I watched a documentary the other day called The Gardener about a man named Frank Cabot. Frank inherited and grew a garden in his backyard in Quebec that is now world-renown. Camera shots of the most vibrant delphinium stretching their arms to the morning sky, irises that look hand-painted, and hedges that must've been trimmed using a protractor are disbursed between something seemingly opposite: an older man sitting in a chair, talking.
I'll admit, it sounds kind of boring. But I highly recommend watching it. It changed me. And after all, isn't that a part of what life is all about? Changing. And I'm not talking about the big changes that we're used to paying attention to like deciding to lose 50 pounds or start a business. I'm talking about those small changes that happen to us whether we're aware or not. The way that your creamer mixing with your coffee last Tuesday morning made you think about the beauty and delicacy of nature, the way that lady's smile at the grocery store reminded you of your grandma, that book you read 3 years ago whose words still ebb and flow in your thoughts late at night. I'm trying to be a person who is easily changed in those little ways. Or maybe easily inspired. I think it helps take a big fat yellow highlighter and illuminate the meaning behind the mundane.
We change every single day. And for lack of trying to change for the better, unfortunately we often get change for the worse. There truly is no such thing as a static person. Even an abandoned house collects dust on its shelves. But I digress. What changed me wasn't the beauty of how the reflection of the moon bridge in the pond below made a perfect circle with the bottom of the bridge, or Frank's words so stunningly honest and insightful that they almost tore a hole in the fabric of our world, letting in a little bit of light from the beyond that we all sense is just out of our reach. It was the partnership between the two.
I'm a creative in a pretty traditional sense. And yes, I understand how cringey that word is but I'm on a mission to reform it. I have a degree in Instrumental Music, I make my living as a florist, in my spare time I knit and crochet. I create things. Sometimes out of inspiration, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes out of a desire to add value to the world (or myself if I'm being totally transparent). Actually, I believe we are all creatives in one way or another. Want to know one thing I've learned from every single "creative" avenue I've put my hand to? I can't actually create anything.
That's the rub of this whole "creative" thing, I guess. I have a sense it's also what makes it so worthwhile. Beethoven's 9th symphony is an inspired masterpiece acknowledged by many to be the greatest of all time. It is also a collection of notes. Notes we can replicate on tools like instruments or even with our voices, but no human invented resonant sound. No person made it so that the sound waves of C and G and consonant but C and F# are dissonant.
Here's what I'm trying to say: I could make a beautiful flower installation, but I couldn't create the flowers in it even if I tried. I believe that what we think is creating is actually joining in a partnership. What if our creativity is actually just us arranging the tools and resources made available to us by our God? It stinks in one way because no person can earn all the credit for making any one thing. But it's almost as if God is nudging us, saying, "come play with me. Come share in my glory."
Whether he knew it or not, that's what Frank Cabot was doing. He had joined this partnership to arrange plants and flowers and water and buildings and bridges and the sky into something more beautiful than the sum of their parts. I'm learning it's a form of worship. And that nudging God does, I guess is inspiration. Inspiration is a very mystical thing to me. I could read multitudes of books on the matter and I still don't think I'd fully understand it. It's this spark that is spontaneously generated and somehow also intelligently designed. It's living. Not in the sense that it has a soul or it can do your taxes, but in a sense that it is born, it moves, it affects the world around it, it changes, and it dies.
Who am I to take credit for any of this? I can't sit down at my computer and pump out a cohesive and inspired thought whenever I want. I can't set an alarm for 3 pm and settle down in front of a piano and string together a song of any worth at all. Because the idea, the inspiration, the creativity isn't of my own production. I think that ideas find us. They're constantly looking to be discovered, floating from one person to another in hopes of finding the one who has the awareness and motivation to transition the idea from the abstract world to the concrete one. Inspiration hits us and we have to join in a partnership with it with a sense of urgency, or else it will leave.
And when we do sign that invisible contract of partnership, we breathe new life into inspiration. We change it, mold it, or maybe just make a little dent in it and send it off into the world different than it was before, just to bump or crash into someone else. Inspiration begets inspiration. Or maybe it's just transferred from one person to the next. Either way: it connects us in some way or another.
I'm not sure I have a final point to this other than how beautiful it is to contemplate. To ponder the things of this world and eternity beyond here that we could never fully understand. To appreciate the concrete and the abstract. To observe the visible and the spiritual. To be students of everything. I think God is inviting us to do just that if we're listening close enough. After all, I don't think God created us to be machines for His glory, but to join in this partnership of spiritual unity to share in His glory.
"Who could ever wrap their minds around the riches of God, the depth of his wisdom, and the marvel of his perfect knowledge? Who could ever explain the wonder of his decisions or search out the mysterious way he carries out his plans?
For who has discovered how the Lord thinks or is wise enough to be the one to advise him in his plans?
Or:
“Who has ever first given something to God that obligates God to owe him something in return?”
For out of him, the sustainer of everything, came everything, and now everything finds fulfillment in him. May all praise and honor be given to him forever! Amen!"
Romans 11:33-36