Creativity in the Midst of Tragedy

Yesterday was a tough day dealing with the terrible news coming out of Japan. I was up early with baby girl who has an ear infection. At about seven o'clock I heard the word 'quake' from the radio in my bedroom and I thought, "Uh-oh, here we go again."

I spent the day caring for baby and doing housework; dishes, laundry, and fresh sheets. I flipped between the local news and CNN, checked in with the Yahoo updates. In amongst all of the tragedy I felt sad for the suffering and loss of so many people. I also felt the thrill of fear waiting to hear what would happen with the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

For the last three days I'd been working on an exercise from 'The Creativity Book' by Eric Maisel, in which you create a special ritual to honor your creative dream. You can find the book on Amazon. I'd been struggling since the New Year to carve out a slice of my life in which to write, something I've never committed to despite my long-standing dream of writing a novel. Suddenly *oompf* I felt deflated. None of that mattered any more compared to the events unfolding on the world scene.

It was this idea that there's so much going on in the world that it's frivolous and selfish to write for pleasure and be a creative person when there's so much to be done out in the world that prevented me from writing anything for ten whole years. In one of my favorite on-line communities today I wrote this:

"I'm not going to tell myself any more stories about how I'm not allowed to create because of what happened ... It's daytime in Japan now. The news stories are about the Japanese people waking up to the full extent of the damage. I can't and won't avoid those stories because to offer witness, even silently is to honor the dead and support the living as they negotiate the difficult business of being survivors in the aftermath of such an event. Life is so precarious and precious."

Today I  write, thinking of the suffering people in northern Japan.