Creativity as Teacher

Sometimes we have the good fortune to be touched in a deeply creative way by something that comes to us by chance. I recall, for instance, a little scene from the first season of the popular TV series This is Us that reminded me of a simple but often overlooked truth about ourselves and our world, namely, that any kind (or quality) of artistic expression can be profoundly moving teacher when it originates from a person’s deep sense of interconnectedness with our world.
 
     In this scene, one of the lead characters, Kevin, has a bedtime interaction with his two young nieces in which he shows them an artistic rendering of his reaction to a Broadway play he is rehearsing. The picture is a seemingly chaotic, Jackson-Pollock-like splash of colorful patches covering the entire page, which Kevin describes as a depiction of what life is all about. In a previous scene, there was a rather awkward discussion about death and dying involving Kevin, the two young girls, and their grandfather, who is dying of cancer. In this context, Kevin’s words are a way of saying as simply as possible, that, even though we can’t always explain, or even talk about some subjects coherently—like the topic of death, or how one feels about doing something (like acting in a play)—everything that happens is part of who we are: everything in some way is “us.”
 
     Can any idea point more directly or poignantly to who we are as individuals than one that places each of us where we ultimately belong: in the wholeness of reality? And can there be any lesson with greater import? A poem comes to mind, written by someone who spent a lifetime creating wonderfully nurturing lessons from the material of everyday life.
 
          A vast similitude interlocks all,
          All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons,
            planets,
          All distances of place however wide,
          All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
          All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different,
            or in different worlds,
          All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the
            fishes, the brutes,
          All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
          All identities that have existed or may exist on this
            globe or any globe,
          All lives and deaths, all the past, present, and future,
         This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
         All shall forever span them and compactly hold and
            enclose them.
 
                                                Walt Whitman, from On the Beach at Night Alone