Creative Sparks And Itches

Creative Sparks and Itches
By John R. Greenwood

Creativity is beneath my skin like an itch you get from spring cleanup in the yard. It starts on the front of your left forearm and by the time the day has come to an end you're scratching the meat off your right shin. Creativity seems to invade every aspect of my life. I look at each stage from different points. Sometimes life appears as a spinning globe tossing off images as they circle by. When viewing the labors of a fine artist my envy levels spike and my eyes hurt from desire and want. The want of more talent, more time. It's an uncontrollable scratch that consumes my space like a heavy mist. The mist that refreshes your dry face, then dampens your shirt, which turns it into a search for sunshine and warm breezes. 

If this makes sense, you have the disease of creativity and the desire to absorb it, spread it, gulp it, savor it. I have no choice but to grasp it by the hand-strap and see where it takes me. It's a ride that's keeps youth running through my veins and old age an 'fu' side note. My attempts to describe creativity and the sparks that spew from its center are a runaway train that makes you want to jump on and off like a John Wayne western. One minute you're riding along side a steam choking iron horse. You jump on before the approaching tunnel. You exit the darkness with a bag full of bounty and jump from the runaway train as it rolls down the mountainside-brakes squealing all the way. 

Creativity wakes me at 3am and places a pen in my hand. It lurks around corners whispering promises of fulfillment-if I stay just one more day. The promise never kept. The thirst never thoroughly quenched. 

Scratch the creative itch. Light the fire. Dance and let the creative sparks fly. Don't try to corral it. Don't send it to the lab for analysis. Bring it back to our schools, put it back in your life. 

Teach it, preach it, spread it. But what ever you do, don't ignore it. I promise you, it's not going away.