Create Beauty Daily

I get these bursts of creativity.  
My explicit creativity comes to me in waves, at least it's seemed that way in the past. 

I've been coming to realize that when I'm practicing presence and being mindful of my life I am creative in so many more ways than just the explicitly creative ways (i.e. writing, painting, making music, you know, the "obviously creative" things).  My practice has tapped me into childlike creativity that can create in almost any moment, seeing shapes in the clouds, taking extra care to cook with creativity, making up stories and songs for Ocean.  I love when I devote time to the obviously creative things, and yet I'm finding that it's all these other pieces that fill in the puzzle to stave off the jadedness that has seemed to come with being in my 30s.  It used to feel so easy to see magic everywhere and feel effortlessly in love with life.  I can still tap into the beauty within and without, however, it feels more effortful.  Talking with a good friend recently I was thinking out loud, wondering whether this is a universal experience, you enter your 30s and life just loses a bit of shine it more easily had when you were younger, is it the moment in history that we're living through? Where we are all addicted to technology.  This moment where we can't seem to stop the hemorrhaging in any of the spheres of public life. The wheels are falling off of every institution for better and for worse.  We are in a Great Undoing.  

Cruelty is being played out on global scales in so many ways and we're all painfully aware of it all the time.  Is it that?  I can't imagine that it's helping.  It can't all be because Austin is in his early 30s.  

I think creativity is the antidote.  And I don't just mean painting, and music, I mean the intentional resistance against the forces that would crush all our souls.  The individual antidote is to create beauty, not to trust that life will be effortlessly beautiful for us. We've got to create it, fill our own souls with the medicine of gratitude and the beholding of beauty. 

That's the individual.  

And I believe the collective salve is similar.  Creativity.  We are in a Great Undoing and what comes next has to be different lest we destroy ourselves. 

Our lives together have been bound with tainted ties that are blessedly being burned, the institutions that could have held us together have done anything but.  What comes next is up to us.  You, me, and everyone we've ever known.  We get to create something beautiful if we want it badly enough.  We've got to create this beauty daily.