Knowing and choosing what we love is what ignites creativity.
“Miss Dior was born of one of those evenings in Provence where fireflies were out and green jasmine served as a counterpoint to the melody of the night and the earth.”
There is nothing quite like the light in Provence.
At all hours, and especially during the edges of the day, an ethereal glow is cast upon streets and buildings and your own feet. Unlike other types of beauty we can impossibly grow accustomed (and then eventually numb) to, the light here and the feeling it evokes inside your chest stays with you.
Follows you.
Keeps nudging at the ankles of who you think you are and pushes against any strange limits you arbitrarily chose. Turns your shoulders back in the direction of who you long to be.
Finding The Courage
We resist change mightily, though. The longer and louder it calls to us, the more adept we are at pretending the new life we dream of really isn’t what we want. We diminish our own hearts with routine cruelty because we imagine a painful loss and loneliness that will accompany our daring.
How do we find the courage to stop being who everyone else wants us to be? To try choosing what we love? How do we remember the person we were at the beginning of our journey before the wolves of culture and influence took away our true selves bite by bite?
We take the raw ingredients of inspiration…like Dior’s fireflies and jasmine…and place them inside the crucible of creativity, stirring gently as the fire of daring leaves its sooty footprints on the underside of the curved bowl of our becoming.
Choosing What We Love
Sit back in your favorite comfortable chair or while moving solo on a walk and let your mind be quiet. This assignment is simple but will require your ability to hear yourself think in a longer than typical stretch. Ask: where do I find the equivalent of fireflies and jasmine to fuel my willingness like a rocketship? That is, what brings me alive like nothing else? What moves me, infuses me with delight and passion and joy?
Open your journal and be ready to write.
Somehow we learned the false notion that push and effort and discipline were the ways up and over the walls that hold us back. Being mean to ourselves may get us an inch or two forward, but we quickly catch on that this is not sustainable. And if we stop there, we are back to square one and stuck. We are not choosing what we love.
Fireflies and jasmine, though, have the power to ignite worlds within us. It is essential we remember what we love if we want to create anything, most especially a bold, new life.
Our Inspired Imagination
Once there, we will melt down and shape-shift. We will let the molten remains that served an earlier version of us, a life we’ve outgrown, stay behind.
We will take the tongs of a carefully articulated destiny and lift ourselves up and out.
We are our most creative act when we lean into our inspired imagination.