“You’ve consumed enough. It’s time to start creating.” That’s the title of a video by a young man named Sam William that I watched recently on YouTube. This was suggested to me by the YT algorithm because I had just watched a video titled “You’ve consumed enough. God wants you to start creating.” by one Connor Woodman. Both of these videos were very recent, and in William’s case had gotten almost 400k views.

In both videos, these young men described coming to the end of their ropes with uninteresting and unimportant jobs. They didn’t really dislike what they were doing, and they weren’t necessarily looking for better pay. But in both cases, they recognized their role was to simply relay products from their employer to their consumer customers. They had become painfully aware that they were tiny cogs in the great retail wheel of consumer capitalism. And that wasn’t enough for them anymore.

In both cases, they turned to social media and became “content creators” and now have thousands of followers. William is sharing his photography while Woodman shares his spiritual oriented life philosophy. For whatever reason, their video creations are appealing enough that people watch them from around the world (William is in Finland and Woodman in the UK) and YouTube pays them to do it.

My point in telling this, however, is not to highlight social media.  Rather, it’s to point to the phenomenon that these two people represent, which is that people by the thousands (more likely millions) are saying their lives need to be about creating things, rather than being about consuming, or being part of the chain moving someone else’s creations to consumers.

As I posted last week, our next Zoom discussion series will be on the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being by renowned music producer Rick Rubin. Rubin has been at this work for decades and has worked with some of the biggest names in popular music. In this book, Rubin has used his years of experience and his spiritual insights to provide a guide to being creative: its universal importance, its value for every practitioner, and the many roadblocks encountered in attempting to carry out “the creative act.”

Rubin makes clear that he believes everyone can be and should be “creative.” Creativity is not the domain of professional artists who are trained and get paid to write books, make music, paint, sculpt, etc. Being human, being alive, means being creative. It is our primary calling as human beings and is our active response to the world around us.

Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us. Creativity doesn’t exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.

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To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.

Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.

We create because we are ourselves created as “singular works of art.” I don’t remember the word “God” appearing in Rubin’s book, but that is only because he recognizes how problematic it has become for so many people. And he’s right: it is problematic because religion has presumed to know far more than it actually does. But aware religious practitioners, the world’s mystics, and serious theologians have all recognized that “God” is always just a word pointing to what is ultimately nameless.

Rubin does as good a job as any secular writer in pointing to that nameless reality that surrounds and upholds us. The calling to creativity is a calling to connect with that reality and respond to it. Rubin quotes the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, later put to music by Pete Seeger, which declares the essential harmony of the universe and all its activities. “To everything there is a season, and a time for ever purpose under heaven. A time to be born, a time to die….” Then he says,

These rhythms are not set by us. We are all participating in a larger creative act we are not conducting. We are being conducted. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.

What can we use for our creativity? Anything and everything. Everything we have experienced, every thought or feeling we’ve had, and the experiences, thoughts and feelings everyone else has had.

This is our source material, and from it, we build each creative moment. This content does not come from inside us. The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available….

To the mind, this material appears to come from within. But that’s an illusion. There are tiny fragments of the vastness of Source stored with us. These precious wisps arise from the unconscious like vapor, and condense to form a thought. An idea.

Creativity is a means for connecting with reality’s Source and its hidden depths.

What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.

Learning how to recognize that “inner landscape” is our life’s task, the task of the artist.

The practice of spirituality is a way of looking at a world where you’re not alone. There are deeper meanings behind the surface. The energy around you can be harnessed to elevate your work. You are part of something much greater than can be explained—a world of immense possibilities.

We’re all familiar with the Greco-Roman notion of muse. Most formal artists readily acknowledge an outside, and often unknown, inspirations for their work. Rubin is suggesting that Source, Spirit, God will act as a muse for anyone who is open to it. “You’re not alone,” Rubin says, but what is present with us is subtle and doesn’t force itself upon us. But in harmony with that Presence, we are able to fulfill our creative, human destiny.

At the end of the creation story in Genesis 1, God says to the first human, “Be fruitful and multiply.” We’ve gotten the multiply part down pretty well but not so much the being fruitful part. For many, creativity is viewed as a talent possessed only by a special few. Rubin’s starting point is that creativity is a human trait and something we all should be doing to be fulfill our human calling to “bear fruit.”

For most of its existence, the church has been distracted by saving sinful people from God’s wrath. In doing so, they have only fulfilled Jesus’ warnings about blind guides leading others into a pit and people with a log in their own eye foolishly trying to get a speck out of someone else’s. What has been conveniently forgotten is God’s declaration in that same Genesis 1 story that all creation, including humanity, is “very good.”

In harmony with God’s pronouncement, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares, “You are the light of the world…. Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” What are “good works” but our creative response to life and the world around us? Don’t put your lamp under a bushel basket, Jesus says, but bring it out so it can shine for all to see. Or as the YouTubers said, stop consuming and get creating.

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