I met a man in a refugee camp, his name was Moses. 

Moses was spirited by a creative spirit. 

He told us how he would get terrible headaches and become depressed when he thought of his terrible circumstances, so instead, he got involved with helping the community build a school and became one of the teachers. 

And then his headaches went away. 

Let’s start with this: 

No, not everyone is creative. 

Because not everyone is being creative. 

But, what we all do have is a creative spirit. 

Everyone focuses on “creative potential” but we ignore that which ignites creative potential: the creative spirit. 

The difference between creative potential and creative spirit is that potential is the capacity to generate and make something, and spirit is the will, drive, and motivation to do so in the first place. 

Five years ago I created a podcast project that centered around the subject of creativity and I polled people and asked who saw themselves as creative and who did not. Forty percent said they didn’t see themselves as creative. 

And yet, as children EVERYONE was creative, because our creative spirit wasn’t dimmed yet. Kids… kids find a way. 

I remember my dad telling me that when he was a kid growing up poor in El Salvador, he and his friends would make all kinds of toys out of sticks. When I was filming a documentary in a refugee camp in Uganda, I saw kids take cardboard and trash and create a toy car that rolled around beautifully when they ran and pulled it with some string. It has nothing to do with resources. They had a problem, and they solved it with what was on hand. A kid who wants that cookie on the counter will figure out how to use tools in their environment to accomplish their mission. 

My mom says when I was one and a half years old, her and my dad were watching TV in the living room and I suddenly waddled in when I was supposed to be asleep in my crib. They were shocked and went to investigate how the hell I got out of my crib. And there they saw I had stacked every single one of my stuffed animals into a corner and created a mound to climb on and out of my prison crib. And ever since then they thought I was a little genius, and the funny thing is every parent thinks their kids are little geniuses because they witness them solving little problems in such an uninhibited way that they can’t help but be amazed. The creative spirit is always alive in children, until it gets tamed, educated, beaten, shamed, ignored, or neglected out of us. 

Speaking of problem solving:

Ben Zander is a composer and conductor who founded the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and he tells a story of his father’s creative spirit: 

“My father was a Jew from Germany and he lost everything in the war. He had to leave his mother to emigrate to England and he was then put in an internment camp there with terrible living conditions. There was terrible chaos and depression in there.

My father, rather than breaking down said, “There are lots of intelligent people here, we should start a university.” They started a university in that camp and they had 40 classes running regularly. They did not have any books or paper. It was just people talking to each other. They ran that university in that prison camp. That is possibility.”

This is the creative spirit that humans carry. Because people will say: “Oh, I just don’t have the time to be creative” when creativity isn’t about having time to make cute things. Creativity is problem solving, making your life and the lives around you better. 

There is always time and urgency for creativity because THERE ARE ALWAYS PROBLEMS.

Prisons are full of people with time on their hands, and we can observe that some people do something and others do nothing. Every one has potential, but not everyone is spirited. 

To be spirited means to be full of energy, enthusiasm, and courage. 

To be spirited is to be ANIMATED. 

Like the story of Pinocchio- he was just a lifeless puppet until he was animated with spirit by a fairy.

Then he came alive. 

To be mean-spirited or possessed by an evil spirit tells us that the potential comes next: the potential for evil and spitefulness. 

And so the creative spirit in humans brings all kinds of creation: it’s what has carried on our survival. If you’ve never seen it this way, please, let it be known, creativity is a matter of survival– both in the external world and our personal interior world.

Humans created storytelling as a means to pass on critical survival knowledge- how to hunt, where not to go, what was poisonous, who to trust, how to make meaning out of suffering. 

The creative spirit in humans figured out how to make shelter to survive any kind of climate, how to navigate, migrate, and adapt in any kind of environment. Creativity is what made humans figure out how to use fire and the elements and progress the sciences. 

The creative spirit not only kept the body alive, but kept the soul alive through music, art, dance, and humor. It is creativity that brought forth ways to be free from real-life monsters: codes, hidden messages used in World Wars and networks like The Underground Railroad. 

Now we have the power to create psychological survival. What Viktor Frankl called, “The last of the human freedoms” the ability to choose one’s attitude (and he would know as a holocaust survivor). It is the creative spirit which allows us to reinvent ourselves and find new ways of being and existing after a crisis. It is the creative spirit which finds a will and a way for the creative potential to be made manifest. There is always time to be creative because there are always problems to solve. 

Even if you can’t help others, you have enough problems of your own to solve.

There’s enough to do for yourself. But you sit there helplessly, because your creative spirit is dead. We sit like lifeless puppets, at the mercy of our circumstances, traumas, egos, paradigms, self-absorptions, and useless internal narratives that keep our creative spirit dead. I would know because this was also me. 

Instead of being a force of nature we become like in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “A feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making us happy…”.

Look… Life can be hard. 

Life has its difficult moments. 

I will never discount the effects of tragedies, traumas, and trials we never signed up for. 

But this is exactly why this project is called The ReKindled Creatives.

Because the fire will go out.

The creative spirit will dim.

We will burn out.

Life happens.

There will be seasons where we walk through valleys full of silence and darkness.  

But we must be ReKindled, because if we never find that inner fire again, we will not survive. Literally.

If you think you don’t have time to nurture your creative spirit because you’re “too busy surviving” my point is that your survival is directly linked to your creativity. 

You must rebel against despair and cynicism and follow joy, find hope, and keep faith to move forward. If you do not nurture your skills to be flexible and problem solve and adapt in an ever changing world, you will struggle to take care of yourself and your loved ones. If you do not find a way to light your inner fire time and time again, who knows what lengths your psychological pain could take you- to harm yourself and/or others. 

When we don’t have this creative spirit animated in us, we can reach others who are on fire. When we don’t have the words we reach for poems and essays. 

When we don’t have the will to live, we reach for music and connection. 

We need the creative spirit in one another. 

I met a man in a refugee camp, his name was Moses. 

Moses was spirited by a creative spirit. 

After that conversation with him, I left his hut feeling lighter. 

Even in the midst of all the stress I felt being in that refugee camp and around our documentary project, he somehow managed to leave me inspired. 

He, inspired…me!

Me who didn’t have even half of his troubles. 

There are times when we need to be rekindled, and other times we need to rekindle others. 

It is a giving and receiving. 

If you haven’t received in a while, maybe it’s your turn. 

If you haven’t given in a while, maybe it’s your turn. 

So, set your worries about your creative potential on pause for now: your creative potential will be ready when you come back with power. For now, you need to get re-animated, re-ignited, ReKindled.

The survival of your creative spirit is how you create hope, resilience, and a better tomorrow. 

To stay creatively spirited is to stay alive: both externally and internally. 

Stay Creative.

Stay Alive.