Creativity and Divinity – the Lost Art of Being a Child
Ancient cultures believed that human creativity and divinity were related. That the gods worked through us whenever we fashioned a poem, a dance, a painting, a piece of music, or an invention. How can we get that perspective back? My son, Ethan, is seven-and-a-half years old. He looks disturbingly like I did at that age. The same tousled brown hair. The same flashing brown eyes. The smiles that melt quickly to frowns, then twist themselves back into grins in a third of a second. Me if I were a hobbit. Or Ethan as himself. Whenever I behold my son’s molten facial expressions, I recall the word mercurial: “characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood; having qualities of eloquence, ingenuity, or thievishness attributed to the god Mercury.” Mercury, as you likely recall, was the messenger of the Roman pantheon. He was always portrayed as a youth equipped with winged shoes and…