The creative seed isn’t within. It is on the other side. Creativity isn’t something you have to hold (or to lose). It just passes through… you. I sense two very separate worlds, one visible and impermanent, the other invisible and everlasting. Humans are a bit of both, with physical bodies and metaphysical souls. Unwittingly, we stand between two realities, like a swinging door.

But we can live our lives all the way to the bitter, bite the dust, end without ever realizing that we are a passageway. Call it ignorance or unconsciousness. Both words denote the same typically human behavior of sleepwalking. A person in this condition is still a door, but he is locked shut. The key, and we all have it, is our awakenedness. Hello? Is anyone home?

Body, as usual, is busy being. He is always standing in the middle of the present moment, whether he knows it or not. Nothing knocks at his door. Awareness opens it. A seedling from soul flots from the back room into the front where it takes root in fleshy soil. Thus begins the creative process.

Mind, awake and aware, carefully tends to the newborn idea. Body is immediately called into action. Blood flows, muscles flex. The senses, alive, are fully engaged. Thankfully, ego has been gagged and locked in the coat closet under the stairs. (Oh, don’t worry, Egor, you’ll be free to come out and criticize the stitching as soon as it is finished.) Body bustles about in great excitement. Time disappears. All hands on deck! Fingers pick up a pair of scissors and begin to delicately cut out the vision. Voice goes from mouth into phone (hoping to reach a receptive ear). Shoed feet run fast to the still open store. And then this and then that and then plop! A nothing from nowhere is now a something from you. You look down at it in your hands wondering how it got there. While people all around ooh and aah and ooh la la.

The song of a soul is at the center of every creation. When something invisible and everlasting goes through a human doorway the result is always humbling. Eyeballs see a new form. But something without eyes perceives the formlessness underneath. Nothingness, when translated into a man-made mold, always brings tears of recognition as our own soul whispers in its wordless way, ‘I know this. I am too. Just like you.’