[Greetings from Austin, Texas! This weekend, I had the privilege of co-hosting another Metamen quarterly experience at the Samadhi Yoga Retreat in San Marcos, Texas. Every quarter, we invite 10-12 men to spend a day collectively reorienting ourselves toward our Polaris—our North Star. And every quarter, the experience is amazing. I am incredibly thankful for my friend, co-host, and founder of the entire experience (Michelle Florez) as well as every single man that’s participated. This quarter’s experience was centered around the theme of creativity. In that spirit, I thought today I’d make my case on the need for creativity.]
My basic contention is this: As children of the Creator, we are called to create. And unpleasant things happen (both individually and collectively) when we don’t.
In our core of cores, we are creative. “In the beginning,” starts Genesis, “God created the heavens and the earth.”1 The very first thing we learn about the God of the Bible is that he’s an artist. His first act is to create, spending the first five days of existence speaking the stars, oceans, and animals into being with the Divine Logos (or Word): “Let there be light.”
On the sixth day, God creates humans and stamps them with the Imago Dei (the Image of God). Our earliest ancestors, according to the Bible, arrived carrying the code of God. And this code came with a command: continue the work; participate in the Logos Project.
From this view, we see how the call to create is woven into the very fabric of our nature and essential to our becoming that which we are and were made to be. Maybe God shared his creative capacity with us because, as William Blake put it, “[e]ternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Still thinking about this capacity for creativity etched into us in Biblical terms, we might imagine the Logos that streams into, and desires to move through, us as something like the in-dwelling Holy Spirit or the soul. To hold in what was meant to come out is to deny the world a glimpse of God that, in all of time, could only ever be seen through us. It is to leave the part of the world only we can heal unmended and the people only we can give oxygen to suffocating.
Thinking in Classical terms, both the Greeks (with their idea of the daimon or daemon) and the Romans (with their idea of the genie or genius) spoke of a spirit assigned to everyone at birth.
The Greek dramatist Menander wrote of “[a] daimon [that] stands by every man, straightway from his birth, a beneficent guide initiating him into the mysteries of life…”2 In Memorabilia, Xenophon speaks of how Socrates lived (and died) in accordance with the mandates of his daimon. The Roman poet Horace described the genius as the “companion controlling our natal stars [or Polaris], god of our human nature...”3 To defy the daimon or genius was to make the spirit malevolent and the soul sick as the darkness infected it. To ignore what wanted to come out of you was to create the conditions for a metastasizing disease to eat you from within. (This is why the Greek description of flourishing, eudaimonia, equates to living aligned with the inner spirit.)
A saying in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas expresses a similar warning to those tempted to keep themselves contained: “Jesus said, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you [bring forth] will save you. If you do not [bring forth what is] within you, what you do not [bring forth] within you [will] kill you.’”4 The theory is this: the unexpressed soul becomes a restless soul. A restless soul becomes an anxious mind. And an anxious mind becomes a diseased body.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield illustrates the consequences of the unlived life and unexpressed creativity with the story of how Tom Laughlin (a Jungian-schooled psychologist) treats certain individuals diagnosed with cancer. In telling of Laughlin, Pressfield (and Laughlin) go so far as to wonder whether diseases (or at least a specific subset of them) are the result of suppressed creativity:
This is how Tom Laughlin’s foundation battles cancer. He counsels his clients not just to make [the] shift [from ego to self] mentally but to live it out in their lives. He supports the housewife in resuming her career in social work, urges the businessman to return to the violin, assists the Vietnam vet to write his novel. Miraculously, cancers go into remission. People recover. Is it possible, Tom Laughlin asks, that the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken (or not taken) in our lives? Could our unlived lives have exacted their vengeance upon us in the form of cancer?5
In my case, vengeance came three years ago in the form of a paralyzing panic attack. As a kid whose first side hustle in elementary school was writing and illustrating comic books, who used to take his mom’s laptop on long road trips and write stories, who designed shoes during church sermons, somewhere along the path of “growing up” I let go of the things the world told me weren’t productive. Any creative juice left in me when I came to my life as a corporate lawyer was squeezed out of me by the desk I sat behind for 12 hours a day.
Except it wasn’t squeezed out of me; it lived on in exile, tormenting me whenever I stopped working long enough to feel it clawing at the corners of consciousness. And then, finally, the build-up of pressure and anxiety burst. After over an hour of laying on the couch staring at the ceiling, heart racing, unable to move, I realized it was the unlived life exacting vengeance.
It was then that I realized my unexpressed creativity was killing me. It was then that I knew I couldn’t afford not to write. The options, then, were obvious: write. Or die.
So, I started writing like my life depended on it.
Because it did. And it does.
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P.S. In the video below, Ethan Hawke makes the case for the utility of creativity:
You have to ask yourself: Do you think human creativity matters? Well, hmm… most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of the sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and has anybody felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud? Or the inverse, something great. You meet someone and your heart explodes. You love them so much you can’t even see straight, you know, you’re dizzy. Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me? And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.
The above excerpt is from 1:51 - 2:46 in the below. The entire video is 9:16 and worth every second.
Genesis 1:1.
Horace, Epistles, ii, 2, 187-189, available here. The genius was the spiritual counterpart of every person that watched over them and was worshipped on one’s birthday.
Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 70, available here. The Gospel of Thomas is an extra-canonical (meaning, not in the version of the Bible we’re familiar with) book discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. It is a series of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Two-thirds resemble sayings from other gospels, with scholars speculating that the other third (like the one quoted here) was added from a Gnostic tradition.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, p. 134 - 135.