Creativity is essential. Why? It’s essential because every time that brilliant spark of energy erupts from your mind and travels through your nervous system, out to fingers and on to page or canvas or clay, it reminds you that you are alive. In that moment life compels you to stitch thoughts and ideas into something new, even if it’s just new to you. Not content to bounce in the confines of your mind, creativity propels you forward and outward, making a little dent in the space around you. Shapes become sculpture and colors become art, ripping away the stillness and disturbing the silence, because the urge is too great to leave to thought; it must be expressed and impressed on the world around you.

Creativity is essential because there are days when the world seems to be turning inside out and those in charge continue to dominate to the injury of everyone in earshot and eyesight. In those moments, the disappointment turns into music; the madness makes way for the magic of momentum and the luscious brushstrokes of art and sound. In every way you become a little bit more bones and blood and sweat; more human. Every tear brings change, sometimes imperceptible until the flow becomes so fierce that something grand will most definitely be born to life today. Your hands will find a way to take the turmoil and transform it into tangibles and creativity will surely morph pain into willpower and wonder.

Creativity is essential because in every way that you present your art to the rest of the human family, you become one step closer to realizing that what you are and what you do adds your name and face to the long list of heartfelt doers that came before you. From the art of the chase, draw on cave walls undisturbed for millennia, to the weaving of women long silenced by the sleep of death, you are there, next in line. We are bound together by our genome and our history of making some manifestation of who we are appear in the form of art. You can create in a space of solitude but there will always be the gentle hum of lives long past, filling your head with light and keeping your heart ablaze. Alone but not lonely, your genes defy you to give up the struggle and, on many days, you will win.

Creativity makes the unbearable bearable. And while it is no substitute for love, what love has ever lasted without creative ways to express it? Love is to life what creativity is to living: one can exist without the other but its value is greatly diminished without the pairing. Joy streams from a place within; it cannot be turned sour be life’s shifting atmosphere and creativity is the inner soil that gives joy a place to grow and thrive. This creative inkwell can be as endless as the stars, ready for you to dip into it again and again until the space between earth and sky is filled with colors and sounds more brilliant than a thousand exploding suns.

We were made to create, with fingers that dance on keyboards and string, voices that turn the lyrical into the ethereal. We were made to share that gift. Whether from hand-shaped clay spun on the axis of life or satiating treats ever so sweet, kneaded with the rhythm of the waves, this is who we are, this is what we do . This is why we continue to produce and watch with keen eyes as what we make moves from hand to hand, finding its way into homes and heads and hearts. There is eternity in our souls and each act of making reminds us that our brains were built to pour into the stream of life something grand enough to proclaim, I am here!

So please keep making, you beautiful blend of stardust, daydreams, and determination. Why is creativity essential? Creativity is essential because you are.