This Creativelocity

She kept adding things to it. Gummy bears and other little colorful creatures having some kind of elaborate yet fun party around, inside and atop a glass mug full of ice cream, cookies and other sweets in general.

Then there was the back page of her artistic creation, with a pair of eyes peering out from some darkness asking:

Hello, is this the party?

And then one of the other gummy creatures responding:

The party is over here, Jeff.

I’m sorry, what?

This was our oldest daughter’s entry in the Downtown Santa Cruz Association ice cream month coloring contest. Both our girls entered. We assumed there’d be dozens of kids that would submit their entries as well.

The winner would win ice cream every week for one year from these local ice cream and cookie shops: The Penny Ice Creamery, Mission Hill Creamery, Pacific Cookie Company, Marini’s Candies and Coldstone Creamery. The girls were so excited about coloring their respective pages and turning them in – and dreaming of all the super yummy ice cream.

Beatrice’s idea was a to color in an fantastical world of gummy bears having a fun party. She felt pretty good about her final submission, as did Bryce. We told both girls that they each had a shot, but in the end, only one person would win. Maybe it would be one of them, or maybe not.

Two weeks later after they submitted on the deadline, the Mama (what I lovingly call my wife) received an email stating that out of over 50 different submissions, Beatrice had won the contest.

A whole bunch of tasty ice cream every week for a year. Wow.

Bryce was bummed at first, until we reminded her that we’d all be benefiting from the sweet win. Beatrice beamed when the Mama told her; we were all so proud! She told the Mama she purposely added a lot of creative detail to her picture to make it a story, and that she visualized winning, something she hears from us all the time. In fact, at the bottom of the coloring sheet where it listed the URL DownTownSantaCruz.com, she crossed out the .com and wrote “Thank you” above it and below it “for making this happen.”

Accessing the creative energy of the universe, the inspired spiritual economy of reciprocity. Put it out there, and get it back. Right on, Bea.

She may be struggling in math, but we definitely encourage her and her sister to stoke their creative fires. They’re both always drawing and coloring and building and crafting and experimenting, and for Bea now, writing stories and comic books. We burn through reams of paper. We recycle a lot of paper and keep it for them to use, and yet, when they burn through that, they’re digging into our home printer and creating more stuff with the good paper.

So that’s why the Mama keeps them stocked up with the paper and pencils and pens and marking pens and paints and glue and a myriad of other stuff that keeps them designing at the speed of imagination, a creative velocity of colliding atoms that generates an innovative gravity too many of us lose in adulthood. And like physics, its messy yet intentional and smooshed together, this creativelocity, this coloring of inside and outside the lines and even the spaces in between – to find patterns and insights and stories where none were before. Maybe someday they’ll help solve the world’s problems, or at the very least, keep their souls nurtured and their sanity in check.

Either way the gummy bear party is over here, baby, where the sweets couldn’t be any more divine.