Creativity Before The Birth Chart

It's a gift to watch yourself as a child. Haven been given the assignment to pick out the soundtrack for our grainy Super 8 home videos, I've been immersed in the moving images of a childhood before life and its smorgasboard of circimstances paints strokes across our visages, testing our natures and deepening our colors.

Who were we at the beginning? I've often thought the closer we can retain the magic of our youth - a piece of our innocence, our natural qualities and our desires - that would sort of be the barometer by which we could measure how well we've played the game.

Rather than looking at the mathematical cobweb of your natal chart, try spending some time amongst photos of yourself as a child when your actual birthday was just receding in the distance and we didn't have the choice to forget about who we really are or question our perfection.

We were all creative then. Living itself was an act of creativity, each step a new adventure and we didn't know if we were going to fall or make it another step. We didn't have socially convenient personalities nor were worried about having conventional goals or making this or that happen by a certain age. We were simply alive and did what we did out of unadulterated joy. We weren't trying to impress anyone or get published or avoid bad reviews.

I look back and I'm reminded of how easy it is to share an ecstatic moment of creativity without the labels and the pressure and all the other things that frankly it's embarrassing to talk about in the same sentence of creativity. Dancing with my sister was pure bliss and that's what made it enjoyable to watch. It's not that I had all the right moves (quite the opposite!) but that I enjoyed it so much and was so unselfconscious. Self-consciousness is something we learn. It's helpful to revisit that place of wonderment and abandon to evoke that freshness in our art and more importantly, our life.