Hello Everyone,

I trust you are well, and happy that Spring is sprinting into Summer (in the Northern hemisphere at least!).

What is it that gets your creative juices flowing? What sparks your creativity to begin once more to do what you do best? For me it is usually one of several things.

Firstly and most often, it is an idea that comes to my attention. It may be an “aha” moment during my day when something pops into my mind when I am in a meditative or receptive state. It may also come from a book or something that comes through one of the media such as a movie, chat show or TV documentary. No matter how the thought arrives, the creative process is triggered. Something makes me think, stirs a reaction and sets the cogs of the mind in motion.

Secondly, it is beauty that captivates and stimulates an outward expression in me of some kind. Whether natural or man-made, creations that glorify the presence of the Divine through a myriad of forms give pleasure. Outward physical form can capture the imagination if one will allow. When color, shape and form (or structure) are synthesized into one entity, such as, for example, in a painting, a sculpture, a building, a crystal, a mountain- or seascape, where the presence of what you are viewing offers more than its face value, when you marvel at something, such visual stimulation can prompt you to consider how you may use your own talents to create something with your own spin of creativity and individual gifts. Everything is created in the mind first, Divine Mind that is, before manifestation.

A case in point, the photographs included in this newsletter are of American born, award-winning Dale Chihuly’s maginificent art-glass creations. Despite limited vision of one eye, his creative visions, having reached monumental proportions, are manufactured, transported, mounted and exhibited in mind-blowing (and glass blowing) style. Set in juxtaposition with the lovely New York Botanical Gardens, is art imitating life, or is life imitating art?

Thirdly, it is music that so readily evokes a response of the senses and the heart. Perhaps a certain piece of music transports you to another time and place and provides a magic carpet on which you can ride to your favorite inner place to visualize something you would like to create, be, do or have. As Merlin reminds us below, it’s all a magical process.

Lastly, and certainly not least, it is adversity that can get the ball of creativity rolling. In the game of life, challenges, obstacles, tests and trials can spur one into finding solutions to problems or alternate ways of doing things. Inaction due to indecision may lead to a “push” becoming a “shove”, where if you don’t do something, you cannot complain about what turns up as a result of the Universe deciding for you! Better to face what is at hand and move towards love and not fear.

It is good to remember that when ideas strike, God is not a tease. There is always a path, a solution and there is always more in our infinite Universe. We cannot hold back for fear of any kind. In Oneness with All There Is, we can know that with every vision there is provision. Or put another way, what we can perceive, we can achieve. Imagination is creation.

May, 2017.