You may think that being creative requires that you have an idea for a finished product. But an important attribute of creativity is that it produces what it will, not necessarily what you were thinking it ought to.

You may think creativity requires completing laborious hours of work. But many people experience creativity seeming to effortlessly expand in life when it is allowed to come forward.

You may think you don’t have what it takes to be creative. But an act of creativity requires only space inside you where judgments don’t intrude. This place is one of wonder, of awe, of whole-hearted engagement.

Here, your being is compelled to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell all that is available in the moment. You do not summarize experience when you are in this place. You do not say something is “beautiful” or “ugly,” “joyful” or “sorrowful.” Instead:

you notice

you observe

you take in

And when you do that, there is pale sunlight on the cedar tree trunks, a feathery texture to the individual green leaves. There is the pecking of a woodpecker to be heard, the coo of a dove, perhaps the howl of a coyote. You smell the trees and what comes are memories.

These may be of the many chests in which your mother stowed your winter clothes away when summer came. In your memory, you may move onto fall, when school started and the clothes came out of the chest. And you may taste the apple cider your parents bought from a mill near your house. You might smell the exhaust of cars that passed you and your friends as you walked to school; you might hear the leaves crunching under foot, see the way they swirled before you if you kicked a pile of them. Before long, through observation “being here now” becomes “being in many places at once.”

William Burroughs, one of the founding figures of the Beat movement, wrote:

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it “creative observation.” Creative viewing.

It may seem hard to escape the cause-and-effect inquiries, the prioritizing, judging and editorializing of the adult mind to quiet down and be, if only momentarily, with something that raises one out of temporal existence into something greater because it contains an all-at-once quality — what is happening now, what has happened before, what fresh feeling and insights unfold against the old ones when the two collide.

Many of us are more used to shutting down the creative will than in opening to it–it seems inefficient and untimely to be creative when there are so many errands to run, problems to solve, people to connect with, jobs to report to. We may chide our creativity as we might a young child taken with the glitter of flecks in the concrete sidewalk when the light has turned green and we want to get to the other side. Creativity is a quickening but not in the way of our human rushing. It really does not take long to practice during one’s busy day, and, even if it did, we should slow down just a bit anyway, shouldn’t we, if we are to live rather than merely rush from one street to the next?

Whenever you can, name one image each of your senses is taking in. Wherever you are, you see something; you hear something (or the lack of something), touch something or feel something on your skin. You probably smell and maybe taste something, too, though you might not at first realize this — perfume of a flower or the aftershave of a passing man, dryness in your mouth or the lingering flavor of garlic. Make a practice of doing this kind of observation several times a day and you will notice that you are more and more in the presence of wonder. This is the creative spirit coming forward.

After you get used to spending a few moments at different times during the day being aware of what your senses are registering, try writing some things down about those sensations.  Borrowing from the use of metaphor might help you do this “efficiently” through comparisons.

For instance, what is the smell of a jasmine flower like? For me it is how the crescent moon in a child’s picture book might smell if I could lie in its cradle. What is the taste of burnt toast like? I think it is the taste of one’s argument on one’s own tongue. What is the feel of clean sheets from the dryer? I think they feel like sunlight on the windowsill where the cat sleeps. It is from the combination of now and then that we produce and create — a painting, a poem, a dance, a song, a woven scarf, a conversation born of the experience of wonder makes us call up experience to make our current sensation tangible, no matter how ethereal.

If any of the quick comparisons you write inspire you to write on, do so when you can. At any rate, collect these snippets somewhere — in a box, a computer file, in email to others or posted on Facebook. Every time you create one of these comparisons you are making something exist; every time you share one, you are helping another person make it exist, too.

Carry the lines of others you admire with you. It didn’t take me long to type out words from a wonderful memoir I am reading now by Tarn Wilson, Slow Farm. The words come from the part in the book where she is remembering being in her first year of grade school, learning to write letters. She had been careful as she formed each letter but had forgotten to put spaces between words. To fix that, she encircled the letters that made each word so the teacher could see that she understood where the words were.

“What do you think erasers are for?” the teacher said.

“And then the part of me that lived all the way to the edge of my skin, to the hairs on my arms, sucked in, leaving a fleshy layer between itself and the air,” Tarn writes.

I carry those words with me now. She observed herself as a child and brought into existence a time when we don’t feel wrong about our creative solutions to problems, when we learn what is essential even if we express it in nontraditional ways. Tarn’s words make me want to “live at the edge of my skin, to the hairs on my arms” again, to feel the world that way.

Fact: Creativity is catching.

We are here to digest the sensations of the world and remember them.

Keep practicing your observations and allowing yourself the leaps of association that bring the new into existence.

What you produce will be luminous. You will find it lit not only by years of living but by something almost other worldly, an intelligence you did not know you had until you allowed your spirit to bring your senses to the fore and inspire. By making sure you practice observation, you will more and more easily find this all-at-once place where creativity burns, where time stands still or doesn’t exist, where the state of flow exists. And you will find that you can return to it when you are done with the chores, the job, the social obligations.

Fact: Creativity is an everlasting well we can drink from at any time; creativity is an ever present mine, its riches always available.