INSPIRED - July 2019

GETTING READY
FOR BIG MAGIC
by J. KATHLEEN THOMPSON
PHOTOS | Living a creative life – no matter its form – takes courage. The rewards
are a richly fulfilling human existence. Photos: J. Kathleen Thompson
One of my favourite quotes is “All the arts we practise are
apprenticeships, the big art is our life,” penned by M.C.
Richards, an American poet and potter. While it may resonate
with many readers, others – for whom art has always seemed
a little unapproachable – will be unmoved. Unless I can
convince them, that is, to pick up Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big
Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, which reads like a love
letter to the artist within us all.
In Big Magic, Gilbert invites us to consider that we are
all capable of getting to the “big art” if we are receptive to
the idea of “big magic,” i.e. the cosmological existence of
creative ideas and how these ideas are brought into being by
human thought. And creative ideas don’t only hang out in certain
bohemian enclaves, she argues. They stalk us all, and the
sooner we give them permission to enter our lives, the sooner
we can get on with the richly fulfilling business of bringing
those ideas to life.
While the skeptics amongst us may feel her theory sounds
too much like “if you just sprinkle it with a little fairy dust,
the light will come on,” we need to remember that when songwriters,
poets and visual artists tell us they have no idea where
their ideas come from, that the poem wrote itself or that they
were gifted with a song last night, they are alluding to this
same mysterious energy.
Most of us have also been struck by those lightning bolts
from out of the blue. They could be innovative solutions to
a challenge at work, another way to communicate with your
teenage daughter, a way to synthesize seemingly unrelated
ideas, or a colour scheme for your living room you’ve never
tried before. But we have been hesitant to explore our creative
depths more fully because it is something that takes a lot of…
courage.
Fear often stands between us and creative living. We fear
we have nothing to say, that no one will be interested in what
we have to say, that what we have to say is self-indulgent nonsense
and has no right to be considered art, that what we say
indecently exposes us. Maybe we are too old, or too young, or
too busy, or too fill-in-the-blank to say anything at all.
Courage challenges these fears, furnishing us with the confidence
needed to take creative risks. Courage is the voice that
says, “I’m here, I am as entitled to tell my story – be it in clay,
spoken word, paint, song, fabric, wood – as the next person.
You may not like it or think it any good, but I do and, frankly,
that’s all that matters.” We listen to Gilbert, Glen Gould and
18 20 JULY 2019 | WWW.SENIORLIVINGMAG.COM