Rollo May, the psychologist who wrote The Courage to Create, defines creativity as the encounter of an intensely conscious human being with her world. And this encounter changes perceptions, he says. Creativity in one’s thinking and in one’s art is unsettling, both to the artist and to audiences, not to mention to the artist’s family and friends and teachers. It is dangerous to the status quo because it changes perceptions and so many people feel a stake in things staying the same. This ability to change perceptions is, therefore, also the attribute that makes one’s creativity, if allowed to express itself, life sustaining at a very deep level. Humankind was meant, I believe, to create, and if we are not creating (making meaning is almost a synonym), we are not growing:

• When we create, we are learning at a very deep level and thus we grow in our aptitude, our feeling and our thinking.
• However, we may experience anxiety and begin to think we are safer when we allow ourselves to stay inert. Staying the same, we don’t have to worry about the unknown, about how others will relate to us when we change and display new ways of being.
• But Alan Alda, the actor, affirms both sides of the coin: “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”

Rollo May writes well about the courage he needed to leave behind his mentors and create from his own insights. As a graduate student studying the meaning of anxiety, he had theorized that the anxiety of young mothers in their teens and early twenties whose babies were born out of wedlock was proportionate to the degree their own mothers had rejected them. He was set to study the maternal rejection he felt was the cause of the young women’s anxiety, but he found that half his group didn’t fit the hypothesis — although they had been radically rejected by mothers who didn’t protect them from extremely harmful situations, he heard them say, “We have troubles, but we don’t worry.”

They did not carry any unusual degree of anxiety according to the psychological tests May gave them. He couldn’t understand this, until walking out of the subway one day, it struck him that all of these young women were the daughters of mothers who rejected them with no pretense that they were doing otherwise, whereas the young women in the group whose anxiety was strongest were raised by mothers who were rejecting them but pretending not to.

The insight, he said, made him feel anxiety; it broke down his previous theory and “shook [his] self-world relationship.” He had to “seek a new foundation, the existence of which [he] didn’t know yet.” He felt guilt in addition to anxiety because his insight would destroy some of what his professors were working on.

Rollo May saw that something must be destroyed for something new to emerge. He saw that creating something new changes situations and that it takes courage to create from your insights when others may not want their thinking and direction to have to change. To live authentically, to live with compassion and to find wisdom first-hand, we must cultivate the courage to make room for new thinking and doing, for taking the risk of sharing our thoughts, even if we fear others will disapprove.

In 1979, almost ten years out college, I could no longer deny to myself that lines of poetry were coming to me every day and I wanted to learn how to use them in writing poems. I was the mother of two young children and desperate to be, at least some hours of the day, someone I believed I was–a poet. And that was frightening. What did it mean to be a poet? How could I allow myself to engage in an activity that wasn’t productive in the sense of the word I had grown up with? Shouldn’t I be going to the university for classes toward a master’s degree in social work now that I had one in teaching? Shouldn’t I study to be of use to society? What did poets do for others? Would my parents think I had gone crazy now that I had kids? Had I?

Here is one of the poems I wrote as I began to study with poets at the University of Washington:

Near the Light

It is snowing suns again.
They land on cracks and rough plaster
where you are trapped in your dreams
that keep coming true.

Once you were flying,
swimming in the air, and they
yelled from the ground reminding
you to close the cellar door.

You went back and every day
became an other day to march to,
scout badges stitched to your sash,
the probability curve of merit.

Now you are the age
your mother was when mornings
she turned first to obituaries.
Nights you dream the full moon
explodes divorcing the sky
and they yell from the ground
something about homing pigeons,
but you fly gathering moon pieces,
all of them, without looking back.

The opening images come from the life I was leading then–I wrote in an attic room where the lath and plaster was crumbling. Coming to poetry, I remembered my childhood dreams of flying. I remembered how conscientious I was a child, doing what was expected of me at home, at school, as a girl scout. I remembered my mother reading obituaries when I was a young girl (which means she was a young woman since I was born when she was 21) and how I didn’t want to focus on death but on expansion and moving into the writing I thought was a calling. I had had a dream that when I looked up into the night sky, I had seen the moon shatter. My poem was about putting the moon, my creativity, back together. It was a dream about how the people who loved me would probably not understand what I was doing. In fact, another famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, who is famous for his hierarchy of needs to be met for self-actualization, said of creative people that, “They are less enculturated, less afraid of what others might say, less afraid of their own impulses, more self-accepting. Less controlled, less inhibited, less planned, less ‘willed.’ Nutty, silly, crazy.”

Yes, I was anxious–about whether I could really write well, about centering my life on something as ethereal as poetry, about deciding to go to school to study with poets when I was at least 10 years older than the other students and had little background in creative writing and writing workshops.

My first steps: 1) taking a summer class sponsored by the free university and taught by a recent MA graduate in poetry; 2) as a participant, learning to strengthen my poems by listening to peer responses and the teacher’s responses; 3) learning that I could apply to study with the same poets the instructor had studied with; 4) learning how one went about publishing poems in literary magazines; 5) realizing I could attend poetry readings; and 6) imagining myself someday publishing my poems, being the featured author reading and teaching others to write the poems they had in them to write.

We talk often about loneliness when we talk about creativity, but with poets and poetry, I didn’t feel lonely–I felt at home. But the anxiety of whether my classmates would be encouraging about my poems or respond negatively was there. I learned to listen to their responses as if they were, however harsh they sounded, encouraging me to write. And I wrote more and more.

I struggled along the way with poems that brought unfavorable news, with poems that teachers and classmates didn’t like even when I thought they were done (and in some cases submitted them to editors who thought so, too, and published the poems), with poems that some family members would feel unhappy to see in print. Publishing those poems may have seemed nutty, silly and crazy, as was the idea to many of being a poet and not a journalist or a writer in advertising. But the more I wrote poems, the more I read poems, the more I listened to and learned from poets, the more wisdom I saw in what was nutty, silly, and crazy. In graduate school, my responses in the Critical Theoretical seminar I had to take made others roll their eyes and grin behind hands that covered their mouths in embarrassment for me. I felt bad about not being met by my peers in the seminar until my advisor said, “Sheila, you are a poet. I wouldn’t expect you to be a theorist.” Whew, what a relieve to be told it was okay, even good, to be myself. To strive for what I felt was honest and true.

No one who takes off in a creative fashion has much to go on but their inner desire and compulsion. That is what I had to learn. And I learned that in fulfilling that part of me, I was learning, learning, learning and reflecting, reflecting, reflecting. I was opening myself to myself and I was opening myself to so many. I was keeping worthy company, as the poet Kim Stafford says, both living and dead (with their books).

What do you remember when you consider coming to creativity in your life? I am thinking that like Rollo May and like me, you have succeeded where you worried you couldn’t and have faced many who your creativity has affronted and you have lived through it. It doesn’t hurt to revisit the times you’ve chosen creativity, though, because every time you start a new piece of writing or need to revise one, the move into another phase of your creativity demands that you gather your courage to create.

Courage it seems is born again and again and, like creativity, is always new.

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If you’d like to read more from Rollo May, here is a link to some quotes from his work. They will sustain your commitment to the courage to create. And here is one to a discussion of his work and its impact.

If you’d like to read more about Abraham Maslow visit this link. And here Google turns up a list of sites with discussions about Maslow’s work concerning creativity.