Piece By Piece: Creation
In the Introduction to Piece By Piece by, Tori Amos with Ann Powers, Tori talks about her music as a creation. She also considers this level of creation in architectual terms: “The songs don’t spring into whole existence; they are built. It’s a structural process.”
Another main theme of her creation is tapping into the Divine, however you define that. She speaks of the importance of maintaining her position as a co-creator. She has access to the Divine, but she is not confused; she is not the divine. She comments about how other actors, musicians, a superstars can get confused and believe they are the Divine; but cautions that this is when they are most likely to fall…
“When you start believing you are Aphrodite, or believing you are the Dark Prince, first of all, you have offended the Divine. And I find you don’t know how to access it anymore.”
So how does this relate to “regular people’s lives?”
Does it at all?
Aren’t we all creators of some sort, on some level, however mundane??
Do you believe that we create our reality?
I would love to hear what “normal people” create… I will add what I believe I create later today.
Tori Amos, Piece By Piece, Ann Powers, Creation, Divine
July 19th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I wasn’t sure if I should create a new post, so I decided to just continue on this one…
When faced with the question, “What do I create?” the answers are not swift or clear for me. Too often I feel that I get caught up in the Western World’s idea of a life which dictates the order in which certain events occur: Go to college, get your degree, get a good job, meet the guy, fall in love, get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after.
Where is the space for creativity in that??
This is not to say that I have followed that prescription for artificial contentment… In fact, I have all too often made necessary strides to go against that grain. So is that creativity?? Am I creating something simply by not doing “what I’m supposed to?”
I get the distinct impression that creation is something altogether different. As a woman, I have the ability to create life (with a little help, of course). Yet, I have no desire to create another life.
I create a space to call home for my husband and I that involves numerous (and almost always tedious) activities… but is that really creation? Creation in the sense of taking pieces of other, smaller things and combining them in a unique way to produce something new. Hopefully, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. But how can you tell?
I have such a logic-driven, analytical mind that it becomes difficult at best to existentially define or display what creation really is… but I do possess a spiritual side as well. And when she kicks in, I realize that we are all creating something all the time. Every day brings another piece to the puzzle that is our life. and the other pieces that fit with it, or maybe especially the ones that don’t seem to fit at all, they all give us a richness, lend us to more opportunities to re-create our ’self’ on a daily basis. I think the problem is that we fail to realize this until something major and/or catastrophic occurs. Where if we had been mindful of our creative powers or abilities, we would have seen the path we laid long before it came to this…
So go forth with the knowledge that you can, that you are, that you always have been… a creator.