The poet Mary Oliver wrote that the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Joseph Campbell, who taught at Sarah Lawrence College for many years, said the saddest students he had were young women called to the creative life, but derailed by the men in their lives, brothers, fathers, husbands, lovers. Men, he  said, are often terrified of creative women, creative power cannot easily be controlled, once unleashed.

He warned those students that if they turned away from the creative call, they would be living substitute lives.

Maria and I are bound by many things, perhaps the most central is our commitment to a creative life. Creative lives are different from other lives.

Pope Francis says we are all called to choose between a life of obedience to God or to money, creatives choose fulfillment over creativity, risk over certainty.

They must always be discerning in the interruptions and intrusions they allow, otherwise they will corrupt the mental, emotional and spiritual privacy from which inspiration arises. This sets them up in conflict with the very people they depend on to live.

Creativity conquers and channels the great uprisings and upheaval inside of me, without their release I would surely have gone mad or be dead by now. I almost was.

Creatives are tormented by the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in a time of intense distractions, of choosing worry over the safety of a regular paycheck, creatives  are predators by nature, they are always looking for ways to survive, they are aliens in a world that moves in the other direction. You will not see a creative on cable news, or in Congress or the White House, they live on the edge of life, never in the center.

In her wonderful weekly blog for the mind “Brain Pickings,” Maria Popova quotes from the writer Rainer Maria Rilke, another great poet who wrote thoughtfully about what it takes to be an artist.

“Go into yourself,” he wrote to a young aspiring creative, another poet, “and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at is source you will find the answer to the question: whether you must create.”

If one is a creative, they they must create. It is not really a choice. I’ve been a book writer much of my adult life, but I think I really became a creative, or an artist if you will, when I began taking photos and when I started my blog.

This blog is my liberation, it is the first place in my life where i could be free write what I wished in whatever form I wished. I have no editors or marketers to answer to.  I communicate directly with my readers, we often spark off of one another, it is healthy and creative.

I write longer pieces that I am supposed to, about different things than I am supposed to. I write to think and encourage others to think, and my photos help me to see the world anew. The blog has stretched my mind, nourished my creativity, kept my inner light burning.

Jennifer Egan wrote that writers and artists must avoid the trap of approval. “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly..Accept bad  writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

I share Anne Lamott’s essays on why perfectionism kills creativity: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”

I would add that perfectionism kills more writers than any oppressive dictator could. I know too many people who can’t write because they are afraid they will make a mistake, or mess up a subjunctive clause. Writing is not about perfection or grammar or spelling, it is about heart and soul and feeling. It is incomprehensible to me that someone would be so paralyzed by the idiotic teachings of creativity that they would stop writing because they can’t spell well.

“To write well about the elegant world,” wrote Italo Calvino, “you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being…what matters is not whether you love it or hate, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.”

Isabel Allende believed that writing brings order to the chaos of life. “Show up, show up, show up, and after awhile the muse shows up too.”

I am grateful for my creative life, and the miracle of finding someone eager to share it with me. It is not a perfect life, it is not a simple life, it is just my life. I have not lived a life free of troubles, but I have given my creative life power and time, and I escaped the fate of joining the ranks of the most regretful people on the earth.