My new home, my campsite, is high in the plateau above Grand Junction, past Glade park, past Mud Springs.  I am told the elevation here is about 8,000 feet.  While geographically this is still a desert region due to the lack of annual rainfall, the elevation is a big change in my surrounding environment.  Cool days, cooler nights.  Quaking aspens, pines and oak brush.  It is very green here and full of life.

Not 20 minutes after settling into camp, I walked to the edge of this site and a doe popped her head up from behind a log.  Song birds serenade non-stop.  Here, there IS the rustling of leaves and even a babbling brook close by.

I have thought a lot about creativity as of late, (especially living in alone a tent), and about that elusive element that every artist searches for, that controls us and, at times, evades us.

There are books written on the subject, many of which I have read, workshops to help us find our way to creativity and classes to ‘teach’ creativity.

In my mind creativity is not something that can be taught or learned.  It is something that is within all of us.  We experience it as a child with games, imaginary friends, finger painting and crayons on a blank sheet of paper.

But as we grow older somehow creativity goes into hibernation.  It doesn’t go away, we just forget to use it.  We convince ourselves that we can’t draw that well, we can’t write that novel or paint like Monet, so we quit.

I have found over the last month that creativity is alive and well.  When the self imposed stress of the mundane existence that we create for ourselves goes away; when we can just sit and watch the world go by and let our minds wander; when we let ourselves imagine and play, creativity is there, waiting to be set free.

When I hold the camera to my eye, the world around me stops.  It ceases to exist.  There is nothing else except the image, the light.  It has always been this way for me.  It is one of the things that saved me from myself over the last couple of years of living in the hell I was living in, (that and the BEST friends in the world!)

Some call it being in ‘the zone.’  When you are in that zone, imagination and creativity take over.  The best way for me to describe it is that I seem to go away in my own world, a different dimension, a closed off bubble where I am alone.  The stress of work, money, depressed emotions and the broken washing machine don’t even exist.

I think that is why society has always looked at artist as a strange group.  Weird loners in their own little world different than the rest of ‘us.’

Let me tell you, from where I stand, that little world that artists live in?  It’s a really cool place.  It’s the place where we can play, like the child we once were.

And that’s ok.