On my way to creation

I’ve never felt creative. It used to be that I didn’t want to be or at least didn’t feel that I wanted to be. I don’t know exactly what’s changed, nor exactly when but I think the strength of the need to create that I now feel began in earnest as I found myself cycling around Australia. A trip that began, a trip that faltered, and a trip that was then halted by a major (mechanical) breakdown and went on at a halt while, amidst my misfortune, I began to fall in love.

Love perhaps is the root of creation. With the germination and growth of that love, ideas began to brew, then bubble and boil, and when I tore myself away from my lover and returned to the saddle to continue my journey I was carried along by all of those ideas. They filled my head, kept me awake even as nights fell on days of ten or more hours of pedalling. The excitement they drew from me often brought me to tears as I chewed on gravel and asphalt day after day. I’d never known anything like it and I still occasionally find myself aching for the purity and clarity of those moments. That journey transformed me.

And then it was over, my journey complete, and the flame went out from beneath many of those ideas. I was still falling in love, that connection growing deeper, but the excitement to create had waned, been blunted and snuffed out by the rush and the noise of a new life in the largest city I’d ever known. Melbourne was all consuming, brimming with festivals, shows and exhibitions, the sights and sounds of so many at the height of their creativity. I loved it and with love at my side I learned to meet it, be nourished by it and grow. I saw more and learned more of art and culture there than I might previously have thought possible. But I wasn’t creating, that was still missing.

As I write this I am in Wellington, New Zealand and I feel that flame taking hold again, making its nascent presence known once more and crying out to be studied and understood. And so to satisfy that cry I have begun to write: about me, the things I think and feel and love; and most essentially about that journey which first drew me outside of myself, so that I might better see inside of myself.

A journey I will always remember and a love I could never forget, together they opened the door to creation for me; this little piece of the web is me finally daring to step through it.