Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 35
In last week’s episode of “Exploring Your Creative Genius,” we learned about “Collective Effervescence,” a phrase introduced by an earlier show guest, Marielle Hare — an artist and creativity coach living on the Haw River near Saxapahaw. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, considered one of the founders of social sciences, identified and named this phenomena:
“In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible to acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces. And when the assembly is resolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we were raised above ourselves.”
Our collective emotions lead to a near-intimate social integration, and those close social bonds feed our collective emotions. I recall a famous sports photo, an image of fans behind the goal, whose favorite soccer team had just been thwarted by a goalie’s great save. The shot seemed sure to go in, and the crowd caught in the image are all collectively experiencing similar emotion, exemplified by most holding their heads in dismay in almost the exact same posture.
Where do you experience collective effervescence? If you are interested in reading more, including insights on bringing more of it into your life, click here!
After we revisited ‘Collective Effervescence’ (Have you said the phrase aloud? It’s fun.) I shared a series of quotes from artists and creative thinkers about their creative processes. Let’s revisit Mozart and Georgia O’Keeffe:
“When I am completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in my memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself…Provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream….The committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and rarely differs on paper from what was in my imagination.”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Note Mozart claims he can’t force his imagination, but he is acutely aware of how to invite it, how to use the environment to trigger his creative imagination. A carriage ride lulls, a walk integrates the brain’s hemispheres while awakening all your intelligences throughout your body, and lying in bed in the dark is a very different sensual experience of the world than when you are actively moving through it… so, stuck on your creative work? Take it for a walk, find someway to live differently with the challenge.
“My center does not come from my mind – it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it… It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth…I do know that the demands of my plot of earth are relentless if anything is to grow in it—worthy of its quality…if the past year or two or three has taught me anything it is that my plot of earth must be tended with absurd care….”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
More than a statement of self-care, it’s a firm declaration of purpose, a powerful assertion that our creative work is too important to be treated as anything less-than.
I concluded last week’s radio show with a brief celebration of Mike Komives, a great servant leader, who had just passed. As the Employment Specialist for Older Adults at the Orange County Dept on Aging and working out of the Seymour Center, Mike was a friend and ally to all of us wThankho are looking for more adventure and joy and love in our lives. Love you Mike, we’ll miss you.
Have any ideas for a show on creativity, or want to recommend someone (yourself?) to be a guest on the show? Email me at carl@creativepopulist.com — and thanks for spending time with this content!
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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