An Essential Aspect of Creativity is not being afraid to fail.  

 – Edwin Land

“The cord that binds us.” That was a song I remember singing in church: Bind us together, Lord, with cords that cannot be broken.  Bind us together with love.  There is only one God, one King, one body.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating or proselytizing one god, one belief, or any particular religion. But there is a connection between us. All of us. Whether that’s a spiritual thing or an evolutionary one I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s something Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Like it or not, we are all connected in some way.

Yes, we are all individuals, unique in our own ways, the choices we’ve made, the families we were born into, which influence the “nurture” part of our development. The genetics passed down from those who conceived us provide the “nature” part of our existence.

But I think that within the foundations of our humanity, we are subject to far more than the truths and rights the Declaration of Independence claimed as ours.

It’s because we’re connected that we all have these imbued, instilled, intangible elements; or better yet, foundations. Foundations that hold us up: strong, secure, unwavering, yet receptive. Okay, what am I trying to get at here? I believe we are all born with a sense of knowing right from wrong. I believe we all have an innate desire to survive and to commune, not only with our families but with the tribe we’re born into. I think we naturally want to explore, create, and learn.

Let me say that again: I think we all naturally want to explore, create, and learn!

That connection that joins us is something deeply natural. I think that’s why creativity comes to children so easily. It’s only as we grow and are taught that things aren’t black and white, right and wrong that we begin to see the many shades of gray between them. We notice that our parents don’t like this or that group of people, and we start to learn about prejudice and bias. Or we hear from a teacher that we’re not gifted or creative, that we don’t have a voice for singing.  In my case I was told that I should learn a trade rather than pursue what I dreamed of. And so, some of these things are snuffed out before we even have a chance to begin.

I had people, teachers, family, and friends, tell me that I couldn’t sing. But I didn’t, and still don’t care. I enjoy singing. Occasionally someone tells me they enjoy hearing me sing. More often, I’ll get the quintessential, “Who wrote that song?” only to answer and be told to let him or her do it or, even better yet, “Don’t quit your day job.”

LOL — I never even thought about quitting my day job. I know I’m not Frank Sinatra or Freddie Mercury. I sing because I enjoy it. It makes my heart smile. It clears my mind from the constant internal chatter that can keep my mind preoccupied rehashing things from the past or trying to predict a future that will never happen.  Redirecting my attention grounds me.  Keeps me in the moment, present. 

This brings me to my creative story. My grandfather died in 1969 when I was quite young — I was seven. All things considered, I have a lot of memories of him. Most of them are great, typical, fun grandparent memories, going for ice cream, getting a haircut, working on his car, watching the Mets and wrestling on TV, and giving the dog a sip of his beer. I’m not sure when he got sick, he died of lung cancer.  I remember that he’d go for radiation treatments and then be laid up in bed with radiation burns and pain. Remember, this was the ’60s, when all that was still fairly new.

After he passed away, I remember the family sorting through his belongings. I didn’t know this at the time, but he was an avid photographer. He developed his own film, had a darkroom, and made his own prints. He even hand colored some of them. I remember going through tons of pictures, some going back to my great-great-grandparents. I was fascinated by it. I didn’t realize that most of these photographs had been taken by him. There was something about the process of sorting through his things and the pictures that day, that drew me to ask if I could have his camera. It sat on a shelf as decoration for many years.

My creativity was present throughout my childhood. I would paint, color, and draw and I was never under the impression that I was good or bad. That is, until I became a teenager. Then I began to compare myself to my peers. I couldn’t draw realistic pictures or paint realistic paintings. That was when the camera started calling my name, saying, Use me, I’m your creative outlet. And so, I did.

The camera is a Rolleicord twin lens reflex camera.  You know the kind where you pop the top open and look down into it to compose the picture, everything reversed and upside down. It still sits on a shelf right in front of my creative desk, alongside some other old cameras I’ve collected over the years. It’s a 120mm film camera.

I remember going to Forest Park in Queens, NY, wanting to shoot nature and landscapes. I also went to Central Park in Manhattan to shoot street scenes. As time went on, in my mid-twenties, I bought my first 35mm camera from B&H Photo.  The Mind of Minolta made the best cameras at the time, I bought a Minolta Maxxum 7000i. I was sure they’d be around forever. Little did I know what was on the photographic horizon.

I bought books and subscribed to magazines. Then I had a friend offer to sell me an enlarger, so I took the next logical step and set up a darkroom. That’s when I started to learn from my family that my grandfather had done all his own printing, too. I took classes at the School of Visual Arts in the city.  Classes on composition, chemistry, and printing and that’s how I truly began my creative journey.

This reflection feels perfectly timed for my 30-day creativity class. It reminds me that the cord that binds us to each other, to our families, to our creative callings is always there, even when we lose sight of it. Every day I pick up a camera, a brush, or a pen, I feel that connection again. It’s the same thread that ran from my grandfather’s darkroom to my own creative desk.  It keeps me exploring, creating, and learning, one day at a time on my creative path.