Creation and Creativity - Part 2

The Impulse to Create

Note from Jeanne: This post continues the dialogue that we began last week, this part focused more on creativity than on creation. Here, too, we are using Noel’s song “For the Love of It All” as our primary reference.

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JTF: How do you visualize Love?  How does one visualize love beyond the experiential?

NPS: It is definitely a creative challenge to close one’s eyes and attempt to be at one with this presence called Love because it is calling for an absorptive visualization, at least to me. I have to render myself  more accessible and aware that I'm attempting to be at one with something much larger than myself, my organs, my body, the world that I'm in, the floor that I'm standing on. So that's the daily challenge—waking from sleep and dedicating myself to meet the day and being in thanks requires reminding myself that I am in the presence of and at the service of this Love that I'm feeling and visualizing. 

JTF: In the next verse of “For the Love of It All,” you turn to the results of the common human failure to see life as sacred and thus to destroy it. What are the allusions there? Who are the courageous ones? 

"Irresistible targets"
I heard someone say.
They were speaking of angels
Who are so courageous day after day
Gunned down on a highway (as we often recall).
I hear a scream; I have a dream
The Love of it all.

NPS: The courageous “angels”  are the ones who care enough about the world that God has loved into being that they actively protest the destructive forces that seek to harm it. The scream and the dream are allusions to JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the wall is the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, in the old city of Jerusalem. And truly, our planet has become a world in labor, resisting a destruction brought about by humanity’s lack of respect and care. 

Still the world is in labor,
She groans in travail.
She cries with the eagle, the dolphin,
She sighs in the song of the whale.
While the heart of her people
Prays at the wall.
A spirit inside is preparing a bride
For the Love of it all

JTF: In these lines I hear the lament of all creatures.  I also hear the hope is in the Spirit calling us to intimate relationship to God and fellow creatures? 

NPS: Yes, that hope spills over into the next verse with its vision of unity and common commitment to help make the world a better, healthier, and more hospitable place for all living beings.  

For the Love of it all,
Like the stars and the sun,
We are hearts on the rise,
Separate eyes with the vision of one.
No valley too deep, no mountain too tall,
We can turn back the night with merely the light
From the Love of it all.

JTF: What do you mean by “separate eyes with the vision of one”?

NPS: We each have a personal perspective of course, but I think we’re drawn by the nature of our making into a communal—even singular, if you will—appreciation of Creation itself.

JTF: So you’re saying that Love empowers us to create communities of human flourishing. We can cooperate with God in tikkun olam, the healing of the world.

NPS: Yeah, the impulse to create, I think is Love centered and Love sent. The actual product depends on the frame of reference, the material being used, and the tool being employed. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I’m not surprised and reminded of that gift in my own life by the whistling, singing or humming of some tune that I've never heard before.  And music—its ebullience, generation of tonality, and its random inner workings and relationships—seems always to be saying something new, being part of something imaginative in life being expressed. 

JTF: Theologian Norman Wirzba says, “Creativity is not something that happens inside an individual's head but in the interaction between people and the world that they are engaging.”  I think we were talking about jazz when I heard you say that the way we might be creative in one part of our lives affects the way we're creative in another part of our life, whether that's artistically or in the way in which we live our lives, organize our homes, and raise our children. 

NPS: In a sense every breath we take is part of a creative process, isn’t it?  Instinctually we are each pursuing a personal path that reveals itself in many forms.

JTF: Your creativity has taken many forms. When you moved to Maine you dismantled part of the four-story henhouse—the building that first attracted you to Blue Hill—and used the timbers to build an addition to your new home across the street. And at the same time you were continuing work on the henhouse, you and Betty were learning to be farmers. Even though you sometimes say that you were a gentleman farmer, I know you and Betty took it seriously.  

NPS: We were certainly learning a lot about farming. Over the next few years we had sheep, chickens, a pig, ducks, and an organic garden.  We read a lot of books and magazines, especially a magazine called Farmstead, which was published in Blue Hill by George and Karen Frangoulis. Small towns make quick neighbors and Karen gave us a lot of kindly in-person mentoring. Our daughter Anna remembers the day she came home from school to find Karen in the backyard showing Betty how to dip newly slaughtered chickens into a pot of boiling water so the feathers could be plucked more easily. 

JTF:  You and Betty have been active in community life.  She helped to start and expand a nursery school, taught French in the elementary and high school grades, and ran a florist business, and supported the local church and library. My research on you from Maine newspapers shows that you have done literally hundreds of benefits in your region and throughout Maine. You’ve supported sustainable agriculture through programs and at farmers markets. And more importantly, you have given your three daughters rootedness and the desire to make the world a better place through their individual vocations. You had what Norman Wirzba calls an agrarian spirit, which means living “in this world in ways that honor God’s desire that creatures flourish and flower.” He says that having an “agrarian spirit” doesn’t necessitate being a farmer, but rather it means “being committed to the flourishing of people, fellow creatures, and the land altogether.” 

NPS: And I drew a great deal of strength from the community in the sense that, as one of our neighbors once confessed to Betty, “we have all moved here for the same reason.” That “reason” wasn’t specified, but its mystery was definitely understood by all of us who had come to live in this small town on the coast of Maine from such diverse backgrounds.

For the Love of it all
We are gathered by grace
We have followed our hearts
To take up our parts
In this time and place.
Hands for the harvest,
Hear the centuries call:
It is still not too late to come celebrate
The Love of it all

JTF: You have followed your heart and taken up your part in many places, but especially in Blue Hill, where you and Betty have lived for nearly fifty years. The Henhouse—and I capitalize it now— because it became a place for hospitality to a host of people doing creative work. 

NPS: Yes, referred to occasionally as “Stookey’s Folly,” the Henhouse became not only a recording and animation studio, but eventually a home for a mime troupe, an office and theater space for filmmakers, plus a launch pad for WERU, a community radio station. It’s been run mainly by volunteers and local support and for twenty-five years has offered a variety of  music and cultural programming, alternative news and community-centered public affairs reporting.  Interestingly, though it initially served Central Maine, it now has an Internet following all over the world. 

JTF: Is it a source of pride that you were there in the beginning?

NPS: Oh, I can’t take much credit for something as organic as WERU. I mean sure, I shared a roof with the station and perhaps arranged a little seed money in the beginning, but really, if you think about it, the success of a community radio station depends so much on the creative programming it offers its listeners. Case in point: the motto of the station is “The Voice of Many Voices.” I can’t think of a better illustration of Love in motion than to point to the many hearts that have come together, offering their individual creative gifts as part of building such a caring entity.

JTF   How do artists, poets and singer/songwriters like you hope to broaden and enrich the faith of their audience? 

NPS  Faith is a matter of the heart, but many people are out of touch with their hearts, sometimes for  reasons unknown to them—such as lack of practice, fear, or conformity to the expectations of others. Art explores these hidden assumptions. Yet, those of us called to the arts always find that it is our vulnerability that connects us best with the experience and feelings of others. We explore personally while engaging publicly. Personally, I feel I’m doing my best work when I show how our lives are connected to one another and to an ever-evolving, ever-creating Love

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Connect

Explore the wide variety of programming at WERU Community Radio. In addition to listening to shows via the station’s live stream and on-demand archives, you can hear archived shows via subscribing to its Local Public Affairs Archives as podcasts.

Quotes from Norman Wirzba are from This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (p 227) and Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (pp.10,12). 

The photo of Noel and the Henhouse appeared as the album cover for Real to Reel, which he released as an LP in 1977 and as a CD in 2001.

Vibrations

Listen to“For the Love of It All”  from At Home: The Maine Tour. Find the lyrics on Noel’s website.

Resonance

What is your sense of the relationship between faith and creativity?