An exherpt from the Creative Call by Janice Elsheimer
Instead of enjoying the creative life God intends for us to have, we may be spending a great deal of time and energy burying our talents so we won't be distracted from the sensible business of life - our careers, friendships, families; our school, church, social, and financial obligations. Without realizing it we have wrapped up our imaginations and talents into neat little packages and stored them somewhere out of our range of consciousness. Paying attention to those important obligations in life is reasonable and responsible, and we'd be remiss if we didn't attend to them. But by not acknowledging that our gifts are a part of God's purpose for us, we stop exercising our playful, inventive, imaginative selves and instead focus only on the necessities of making a living, a home, a family, and a place for ourselves in the grown-up world.
Sometimes our closets, attics, and garages get so full of stuff that we no longer know what we have, and if we do, we no longer where to find it. By the time we need something, it has been shoved so far behind our more current vintage possessions that we have to disassemble our entire closet, attic, or garage just to get to it. Similarly, when we bury our talents, we let more urgent activities and responsibilites pile up in front of our creative lives until the artist self is shoved to the back of the closet. Burying our talents is not something most of us have done on purpose; it is just something that gradually happens.
And a quote from Pope John Paul II:
It is in living and acting that man establishes his relationship with being, with the truth and with the good. The artist has a special relationship to beauty. In a very true sense it can be said that beauty is the vocation bestowed on him by the Creator in the gift of “artistic talent”. And, certainly, this too is a talent which ought to be made to bear fruit, in keeping with the sense of the Gospel parable of the talents (cf. Mt 25:14-30). Here we touch on an essential point. Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation—as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on—feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbour and of humanity as a whole.
And four songs to inspire my creative friends to take their creativity out of that attic or closet, dust it off, and use it!
Melody of You
http://www.youtube.com/wat....ch?v=Noqsmbq84VA
The Painter Song
http://www.youtube.com/wat....ch?v=4t-gKP-BOyo
Art in Me
http://www.youtube.com/wat....ch?v=x_9-npiaZoc
Add to the Beauty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBhaX0eDBbY
And a video about right brain education: (God made this part of us too...it's not useless)
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