i texted the above phrase to my new friend joel about a week ago. days later, he retweeted his year old tweet with the exact same words. what a gift to so precisely share a wavelength with someone. joel concurred.
creativity is an interesting thing. i think because it can feel so personal, emotional, and intimate, we sometimes presume a rather rigid ownership over our works by believing that we have singularly created them.
though my creativity manifests via many paths, i've found that much of my short-form writing comes from ideas, thoughts, or phrases just “popping” into my head. over the last few years, it’s got me thinking about musicians who say that the music ‘just comes through them.’ i get it now and recognize these phenomena as a channeling of sorts;
whether consciously or not, i believe we are channeling from our interweb of mass consciousness, which i believe to ultimately be a single, unitary thing. in this way, i’m understanding that when we really get down to it, creative works don’t really belong to anyone; if anything, they belong to all of us. creativity, i believe, is the process of going into our collective psyche and materially illuminating truths that already exist inside our shared energetic body.
obviously, this act of channeling, expressing, and materializing is still a labor and an immeasurable service to our society. artists should still be paid well and credited for their work, boundaries should be respected. and while there is certainly exploitation and intentional plagiarism, all this does make me wonder about our often automatic insistence that duplicate works must imply an intentional “copying” and a necessary villain.
that two or more people can come to similar ideas or even the exact same one, for me, goes beyond a shared inspiration or someone's subconscious drawing from previous exposure; i believe people can independently come to the exact same point simply and purely because we are drawing from the same place that we all equally “own” and all equally are— our collective consciousness.
i’ll continue percolating on what i think this means for the creative industry. until then, i think we could be nicer to each other sometimes.
so— open hearts, y’all? <3