Elizabeth Gilbert's epic TED Talk on creativity and genius

I've read Elizabeth's book, Eat, Pray, Love (not a paid link), and it was incredible.  Definitely her journey, both around the world in a physical sense, but even more so, as a human in the personal, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the emotional sense, was a period of her life struggled through, and captured brilliantly in her book.  As she said in the TED Talk, it would be a tough act to follow for any creative person. 

Yet, she tapped into what ever she tapped into while writing her book, her daemon, her genius, again, and wrote and gave this epic TED Talk.  I have lost count of how many times I've watched this, including just now, before writing these two or three paragraphs, to encourage you to watch it. 

I've spent the 47 years I remember, of my 53 on Earth (this time around), struggling with, and learning to work with, my own creative process.  My process, at times is something like the poet she speaks of.  When I wrote poems a lot, I thought over my basic ideas, and soon learned to go on with other things, and forget all about the poem.  Poems, in particular, come when they want to, or perhaps more accurately, when they are needed.  I, too, often felt a poem was coming shortly ahead of time.  My metaphor was much less pleasant, though.  Poems gurgled around inside me for a bit, and then, much like diarrhea, suddenly surged with the need to escape. 

If I didn't sit down and write them right then, I lost them.  If I put a poem off for ten minutes, it would come out much different than if I wrote it when the urge first came.  If I didn't write a poem down, the spark of the poem went on to wherever poems go, and left me behind.  I've not written quite a few poems.  But I've also captured hundreds, somewhere around 400 to 500, between 1987 and 2008.  And I lost almost all of them, moving to North Carolina, in 2008.  That's a story for another day. 

Since 1998, I've been carrying a simple, black, Bic, medium, ball point pen in my pocket, just to catch poems and other creative ideas.  I feel incomplete without that pen.  I usually have a folded up piece of paper as well, which I make my "Stufftado" list on every morning, as well.  I'll unfold that to write on, or find any other piece of paper around.  If there's no paper, I'll write on my hand.

Since losing all my poems, I've only written about 4 or 5 poems in 11 years.  But I get other ideas.  Just last night, sleeping at a large bus stop, as the homeless man I currently am, I woke up with an idea about a drawing I had in mind.  I sleep in my clothes, on a piece of cardboard, on top of concrete.  My pen is in my pocket all night.  I know my process well enough now, that I pulled my pen out of my pocket, unfolded that piece of paper, and wrote a few words that will likely be on my finished drawing.  I don't remember what those words are.  The spark comes, I write it down, and then I go back to sleep, in instances like that.  In the morning, I often forget the incident even happened, until I think about something related, and it jogs my memory.  That was the case today.  I forgot about writing that idea down, those few words, until I was halfway through this blog post.  That's a part of my creative process. We all have one, and it's a continual mystery, and we each must work to learn, adapt to, and work with , our own personal creative process, if we want to create anything. 

This is my wordy way of saying, "Watch this amazing talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, let it soak in, and watch it whenever it calls to you."  Keep working to learn, and work with, your own creative process.  There's a higher reason we are drawn to do certain projects, creative work, and to do it at certain times.  Follow your own sparks, and then do the work involved.