Well, hello there, thanks for coming back. The last few months I’ve shared with you about how I’ve worked through grief by finding creative opportunities. I’d like to explore different topics in the future, but before I do, here are some remaining musings on creativity. This might offer further reflection, or simply a good laugh. Regardless, I’m draining the tank of thoughts on creativity here . . .

Did you know that 120 years ago two creative geniuses from Ohio went to a little hill in North Carolina with an idea to develop a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft? Their persistent intentional tinkering has given all of humanity the gift of air travel. On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers flight introduced a mode of transportation that forever changed the course of history. With it, the world got a little smaller, and we all became a little more connected to one another. Their success came about through trial and error. Their trial and error was the process of playing out ideas to solve a problem. Those ideas were the creative fruit of contemplation.

Now, nearly 25 years ago, at a jazz club in Berkeley, California, the world-renowned Yoshi’s Jazz Club, a piano master named McCoy Tyner was accompanied by three up and coming “young lions” of Jazz. Drummer Brian Blade, bassist Christian McBride, and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman all performed a prodigious set of tunes. The audience was gifted with an auditory experience that forever impacted at least this listener.

While I was not able to be there for the Wright brothers’ famous flight, I was able to be present at that performance at Yoshi’s. It was an amazing experience that was not supposed to happen. You see, I was out visiting my uncle and he had purchased tickets for him and a date. The date fell through, and so he asked his twenty-something nephew to go instead. Now, at this time I wasn’t too interested in jazz. Although, I had been playing guitar and bass for about ten years, my youthful interests were in the progressive rock genre. There was little appreciation on my part for this thing called jazz. But that night, it all changed.

In the course of the set, note by note, I was exposed to excellency. The significant part was watching Joshua Redman reaching for unobtainable notes, oftentimes missing the mark, but eventually landing it. The audience would erupt in jubilation. It was then that I had an epiphany about jazz. While so many others things, jazz is the exploration of sound excellently executed. You see, here was a phenomenal player, one who knew their instrument very well, making what would be embarrassing errors. These weren’t errors though; rather they were attempts to grasp at the ungraspable.

At each measure there was an evaluation and a determination on which technique (out of set of techniques he had spent a long time learning and practicing) that would get him closer and closer to the goal, the vision, he had set for himself. It’s like a mountain climber trying to reach some incredibly difficult hold on a technical climb; all for the end result of something amazingly beautiful in both its simplicity and intricacy. There is something to the process of working and reworking, editing, shaping, honing, that is also part of the creative process. Perhaps it is that the process itself mimics life.

That night, those men, and my uncle, gave me the gift of appreciation for jazz. A gift that I have cherished ever since. Now there is something humbling about receiving gifts, whether it’s a physical item or perhaps an experience. Typically, a gift is of precious value since it’s something that you could not have come to possess on your own without sacrifice. In a way, receiving something you could not have gotten on your own is evidence of your inability to get it on your own. In no universe would I have been able to fashion that experience. Jazz appreciation was not even on my radar of things that had interested me; however, once it was given to me, it would forever change how I saw things musically.

A few weeks back, I turned fifty, and while I had hoped to keep that quiet, it somehow got out. During our church’s House of Wine service, it was announced that it was my birthday. The congregation sang happy birthday to me! Let me tell you I was touched by this, but that was just the start of it. A number of folks stepped forward and prayed over me and spoke encouraging words into my life. Each word was a new gift, a very precious gift, a gift that was fashioned from within themselves about what I meant to them. This too was not something I was expecting. I had no concept of the way people saw me and what I meant to them. My heart ached. Also the fact that these words came at a time when I was questioning myself was truly a gift from the Lord.

This was something so precious that my only response was to safeguard it in my heart as it was a truly humbling experience. And with that humility came the gratitude that recognizes the value of the gifts received. 

I know, you may be asking, “Where is he going with this?” My answer would be, I don’t know…but somehow I think there’s a connection between creativity and gift-giving. Perhaps it is that when we create, we are taking a part of a lived experience and sharing it with the world. We take the relationships, the good times, the bad times, and everything in between the internal components of ourselves, and fashion some sort of external version of it. Take for example, writing. Here I have a variety of thoughts, emotions, and sensations that I am wrestling to communicate with language, American English, and then using technology (which has it’s own language) to organize the shapes we call letters into a digital field to convey a somewhat coherent image of what is happening in my head. In the same way, the choreographer uses human dancers and movement to portray the same.

There is a desire to share something good, worthwhile, or meaningful with others. And to be the recipient of something good surely comes with appreciation, and hopefully that sense of humility as well. If it doesn’t, perhaps the creation was only meant to be thought-provoking. (And please note, I do recognize the trend in modern art to be offensive. I’m not talking about that here. That perhaps is the topic of a future post about why someone would take what was meant for good and make it offensive.)

As I write this, we are a few days out from Christmas. The tradition of exchanging gifts with one another is not simply to get that new pair of underwear or socks from your mom, or to get a new bike, or that toy you’ve been waiting for. We exchange gifts out of love for each other, and many times that alone is what’s humbling. Someone loves you–you may have treated them poorly from time to time, been too quick to judge or made a comment–yet here they are giving you something. They are showing you mercy because they love and care for you despite those times when you weren’t so nice. How can that not be humbling?

Our heavenly Father sent His son Jesus as a gift for all of humanity. And while the baby Jesus received gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the magi, it is Jesus who has given us the greatest gift of all. Our Savior, Brother, Friend set us free from death and sin!! He has washed us white as snow and invited us into mirth and feasting. May each of us remain humble and grateful for all the Lord has given us.

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AI-Generated Art by El-Monte (i.e. Mic Montalbano, the guy who wrote this thing) titled “How to Tune a Fish in F Major.”