Walk Creatively Through October

Most of us walk through each day in a straight line, following a pattern from morning to evening, seeing only necessities, dutifully doing our duty. Some fortunate few with imagination and a creative feel for life take a wider view, a more exploratory route, seeing the possibilities on the edges and relating them to truth at the center.

October is the month for poets, for the creative person, for the person with imagination—the one who sees sermons in stones and happiness in winged butterflies, who points up a truth in images, who fashions words to be remembered.

A homemaker with imagination, like a poet, can make metaphors of mundane tasks and create poetry in every part of living.

A poet’s metaphor must be a true one. Whatever his x, it must be true to his y. When Robert Burns says, “My love is like a red, red rose,” he knows his life is as beautiful as a rose. As the formula for a metaphor says, the x must equal the y.

Walking creatively through your day, with love as your x, what could become your y? A white chrysanthemum on the breakfast table? Or an unexpectedly warm kiss for your “dragon-fighting” hero as he rushes to meet his car pool? Could x (love) be a big bowl of buttered popcorn (y) for an after-school snack? Or popovers for supper? Or a quiet moment’s conversation with each loved member of the family before prayers? With imagination, the possibilities are limitless.

Every woman is creative. All that she does is, in a sense, creative. The point is to make this creative effort point her and all those around her toward the ability to stand in the presence of God.

Suppose x in our metaphor formula is the activity for home evening in October. Let y be a nut-cracking party. Crack pine nuts, walnuts, or pecans—whatever nut in your area is ready for cracking and roasting and storing. Or let y be a special family talent night—perhaps a musical evening, with such home instruments as bottles, combs, pans, and sticks. Perhaps the lesson could close with a family testimony night—a spiritual y for an intimate x (home evening).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his poem “Days,” looked at time, our “hypocritic days,” as barefoot dervishes, muffled and dumb, marching single in an endless file, bringing diadems or fagots in their hands.

Looking creatively at your days, in endless file, do you make diadems of such moments as a story hour with the preschoolers, an early morning stroll or jog with husband, the raking of fall leaves with your sons, or reading e. e. cummings as you roller-wrap your daughter’s long tresses?

Though the days are endless, the diadems offered while children share your home are brief moments for building truth and beauty.

Creativity has been defined as seeing ideas in new relationships, as discovering or producing something new through one’s own thinking. All creativeness lies within the creator, for creation is a qualitative experience of the highest order, and it brings into activity the whole person.

Walk creatively through these glorious days of October.

Mabel Jones Gabbott