September 21, 2007
by Robert W. Barker
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My grandfather was born in 1896 and died in 1988 at the age of 92. Previous to his death I paid a visit to the hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to see old Pa once more before he passed.
Driving down from Ohio I considered all the things Pa taught us, and his vast influence on my own personal thinking and attitudes. When I arrived family surrounded his bed and a deep reverence hovered in the atmosphere, solemn as looming death.
His eyes held a yearning gaze and the ever growing dementia he was experiencing would not allow him to recognize the family he loved so deeply. As I held his hand and watched his old face awaken he became lucid for the first time in months and smiled at me.
"Oh its Nita's boy Bobby, when did you get here?"
The rest of the room went hush, shocked, as he did not recognize his sons and daughters that tended him daily, yet somehow he knew me.
"Hey Pa, yes sir I am here, I wanted to see you and make sure they were treating you right."
"Oh Bobby I am tired of living and want to go where Nellie Mae {grandma} is, in heaven."
"You will be there Pa, no sense being in a hurry, but when you get there say hi to Ma for me will ya."
A tear formed in his eye and as it rolled slowly down his thin wrinkled face he swallowed hard and said:
"Bobby I have no regrets in this life, accept one, I wish I had danced more."
Now this struck me as strange as Pa danced every morning of his life right after rising from his bed. He danced a jig to the Blue Grass music on his old radio, usually before sunrise. I recall seeing him do the jig through the crack of his bedroom door years before and thought he was one happy looking fellow, and quite a dancer as well.
So why his regrets for not dancing enough?
He squeezed my hand fell asleep and never spoke another lucid sentence and within five days he was with grandma.
Pa passed away and that statement haunted me for years, what could he have meant by that?
I finally came to the conclusion that he loved to dance; it was one of his greatest joys in life. When he thought of his life he missed dance more then any other aspect of his long existence. In those physical moments he danced, it was his creation, his reality, his personal joy, expressed his way, and celebrated daily.
Our creative urge and the things we do to enhance it, are often our fondest memories, there are family love and our creative life's recollections; both appear to be the pinnacle of human existence.
Creativity is not just for Michelangelo, Donatello, or Picasso, it is for every human being and denying it is a form of repression.
Existentialist John Paul Sartre told us that we create our own lives and mold ourselves and we must take responsibilities for both creative impulse and destructive forces. Forget blaming phantoms, or unseen sprits, it is our responsibility to manifest reality with the tools at hand.
We create families, jobs, businesses homes and national infrastructure, we are the creators of our own reality, and creation is tantamount to human endeavor.
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The Tensions of humanity are overwhelming in the new millennium; it is a great feat to remain in touch with that creative sprit and appreciation for the elevated aspects in life. Yet it is vital to us all to be in contact with that which makes us unique as humans. Art, Philosophy, Science, literature, the creative urge innovative skills and our human identity are based on our higher impulse to manifest.
Homo Sapiens have continuously strived to manipulate and recreate the environment, for many reasons. From the cave painting primordial stages until present day, man has strove to capture or recreate the beauty and divert the cruelty that surrounded his world.
Cave art was thought to direct the sprit of the beast they hunted, and so it was more then esthetics initially, it had direct perceived influence on existence in their world.
Art defines us, encompasses us as a community and appeals to our higher selves; it is the measure of the level of civilization. Art compliments man and reflects that divine sprit we seek and reminds us we too can craft reality like the creator.
One ancient professional dancer I knew said that she would get naked on the full moon and dance in the moonlight, and it brought her great peace of mind. This offered her a sacred connection to the dance of life; it became her form of prayer and she dedicated all the moves to God.
Life is one big dance, and as Ram Dass {Dr. Richard Albert} called it:
"The only dance there is."
Creation is more then a past time, it moves us to stretch our realities and become something other then banal humans, and we find what we might call a "Spark of the divine."
We are all creators and without the creative impulse we are just organisms that eat sleep and die, art and our better manifestations defines us and establishes civilization.
This creative sprit is evident in numerous ways, through cuisine skills, utilitarianism, or functional tool making, art, music, dance, physical training, gardening, reading, hobbies and many other human endeavors that lift the sprits or help provide for human beings all over the planet.
Our need to create and leave a legacy behind is what makes us unique and "Homo Sapien" or thinking man. Yet we often deny creative value and disdain its constant influence, as outside our reality and not as significant as science or economics. Many thinking people maintain that without this living creative impulse our science and economics suffer as well.
Art education and humanities that promote the creative sprit have slowly been shoved aside for the mundane. Maps are no longer studied, so few can find Iraq the country where we watch death occur daily, history is weakened in the US classroom; therefore we must repeat its lessons. Art is eliminated and geography rarely taught, music funding cut and fewer Mozart's produced.
All this leaves America with a looming gap in her coming generations knowledge of the globe and it's vital creative sprit. Creativity through humanities is marginalized as not functional or pragmatic enough for the modern world, and we become more sterile and less open with its slowly dwindling influence.
We do continue to create and innovate, but the baby boomer generation was the last massive group exposed to human endeavors on all levels.
Our future may be a bit more robotic and less exciting with the absence of this appreciation of art and a stimulated creative impulse.
Literature and skills of language are losing ground to code text messaging and quick sound bites.
Children once outside creating their own games are now sitting in their bedrooms in front of a screen and growing obese from lack of exercise.
While certain creative redeeming attributes can be discerned from the interplay on video games we lose far more then we gain in this current obsession.
Our imaginations are consumed by endless movies, video games, I pods, viewer sports; the listless cyber world pursuits replace tag, baseball or just plain running to feel the wind in your hair.
Creativity in those techno fields has increased, and in the tech realm we are growing in our conceptual imagination but why limit our visions solely to high tech?
Consider poetry, eloquence, critical thinking, logic and the awe of nature as being substituted by synthetic life in cyber space.
Not that there is anything wrong with any of those new things, they are the very product of the ingenuity of our imagination.
Yet we must not let our children turn out to be out of touch with the existent world, or we risk numbing their senses.
Teach your children well and bring balance to their lives, and the "Agape" for life of the Hellenic origin will become their motto.
And teaching them to "Dance in the Moonlight" just might create a better world for all the offspring of the globe.
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Robert W. Barker [send him email] is a writer, professional photographer and travel aficionado from Eureka Ca. His work is carried on many web sites around the globe, a first novel recently copyrighted in the library of Congress, is soon to be published.
