About Creativity, Passion and Jack the dog

                                       CREATIVITY, PASSION AND JACK

I am often asked 'What do you mean by human beings creating beyond themselves?'

(This refers particularly to my last blog where I postulated such a notion).

The easy answer is that I read it somewhere years back and liked it and adopted it into my personal useful philosophy phrase box, along with similar phrases like 'You teach best what you most want to know' That sort of useful buzzybrain stuff.

But I feel it does need explaining, (if only to myself).

So let's start with animals.
Jack, for instance, our neighbours' dog.

 Jack is an escape artist, a canine Houdini. He is also a wanderer and Casanova, dog version.

In Italy, where I live, dogs have to be either chained, kept within a fenced garden or on a lead if out with their owner. None of these options appeal to Jack who burrows under deeply dug fences (or climbs over them) bites through chains and leads and consequently is the nicest and brightest dog I have ever met. We are best buddies.

Birds build nests, squirrels, bears, badgers, make winter homes in which to hibernate and cuckoos commit genocide, bird version, by laying there eggs in nest of small birds.

But you know all this stuff

You get what I'm going on this though, don't you?

Animals, and yes human animals, are born with certain instinctive behaviour patterns. but we have that something extra, beyond the basics of territorial imperatives, survival and hunting etc.

And it is this added instinct, or desire if you will.... to create things which have never existed before, this is what I mean by creating beyond ourselves, be it what we call art, a garden, a poem, a tune, and entering what I choose to call the creative garden of now; that realm of total absorption and abandonment where we are alive to our passion. A passion which has no end in view except the act of creation itself

So you've guessed it, this is what our workshops are about, finding out how to enter this state of receptive mind. Not a conditioned mind or a repetitive mind but one which is open to that enriching flow of creative beyondness which is waiting for us all if we had the good sense to step back and recognise it.

Michael and Michelle Rumney are running a workshop May 26 weekend in Assisi 'Time and Space to be Creative' a beautiful place, a sumptuous Italian weekend.

For info you can call Michael or leave a message on WHATSAPP +39 3283535358, SKYPE spiker39

Or email him on michael@starstone.org