we are all, always, making something
There is a word we have borrowed from artists and handed back too rarely to everyone else.
Creative.
We use it like a visa, stamped into certain people and denied to others. The painter gets it. The writer sitting at her desk staring out at the sky, waiting for the words to come. But the man in the yard who has learned to read a log, its grain, its resistance, the exact angle at which it will yield cleanly, and the woman who lets a line of poetry accumulate the way weather accumulates, slowly and then all at once: what do we call them?
We should call them what they are: creators.
My husband Matt cuts logs to perfection. That sentence sounds simple only if you have never tried. There is a geometry to it, to reading the wood before the blade ever touches it, to knowing where the resistance lives and where it doesn’t, to making a clean thing out of something rough and unwilling. A log is not passive. It has its own opinion about how it wants to split, and the work is in the conversation between that opinion and your own.
What he makes in a kitchen could not be fathomed from the outside. He curls up with cookbooks the way some people curl up with novels, dreaming in flavor, making connections that seem impossible until the moment they are obvious. And whether it is a log brought to order or a dish arrived at through some private alchemy, the gesture is the same: something wild and difficult, shaped by hands that knew how.
That conversation is the whole of creativity. We dress it up in galleries and grant applications, but at its root it is just this: paying close enough attention to know what something wants to become, and having the patience and skill to help it get there.
The word friend doesn’t properly cover what Jacki and my relationship has meant to me over the years with all of the ebbs and flows of two women becoming. And her poetry arrives the way good things do, slowly, and not all at once. A slow drip. One image gathered from Greek mythology, one from the mushroom bolo tie (and maybe a hot pink scrunchie with her long ponytail growing out of her head like an ah-ha moment) she has arranged and rearranged until it said the right thing, one from something she felt on a Tuesday that she couldn’t name until Thursday. By the time a poem emerges, it has been accumulating for longer than anyone knows.
There is a discipline in slowness that we undervalue. We praise the sudden flash of inspiration, the painting completed in a fever, the song that arrived whole. But Jacki’s way, gathering, waiting, letting the material steep until it is ready, is just as rigorous. It requires trust. Trust that the slow drip is not laziness but process. That the poem forming in the dark is already a poem, even before it is written down.
We have made creativity into a competition and that is our mistake. We compare our quiet making to someone else’s loud output and find ourselves wanting. But Matt spending hours making sure that his recipe would meet his mother’s high criteria and Jacki dripping a poem into being over month, these are the same essential act.
That attention is irreplaceable.
We are all, always, making something. The only question is whether we are willing to call it what it is.
