I’ve got it! Creativity is the act of settling land. Instead of knowing where you are and planting crops where gravity, sun, rain and snow say to plant them, like the mustard at the rim of the dust fall below…

… you roll up your sleeves and make a new world out of the patterns of your mind, like this:

It requires capitalization, destruction of an entire ecosystem, lots of petroleum fired in the engines of huge pieces of mining and highway construction equipment, and in the end you have clay lumps, but it’s yours. You did that. That’s creativity. If it’s not that, I’m still stumped. Maybe it’s the self-heal below?

In other words, you’re walking along, la de da, and there it is, so what do you do? Pick a stalk? Make a picture? Keep on walking into your memory that has not revealed itself yet to you (but soon is going to)? I think those are creativity, but what if the self-heal led you in that story? Is that creativity? Is your creative actually self-heal’s? Or has she passed it on to you? The questions are absurd, because all of them entail not knowing where you are in the unfolding of your memory. If you knew, you wouldn’t ask, because you could see it coming and, here’s the thing, the self heal is the vision of it coming. So do things appear to the human mind in isolation, when it is in the world and not distracted by the stories of social groups made up only of human members.

What if you sat down for dinner and chicory faced you? If you lived here, actually lived here, you would know what to say, because you had already said it. That is not creativity. It’s called paying attention. Creativity is when you stake it and claim it for yourself. This young woman on July 1, she knew about this.

One of those privileges given to White people is the permission to believe that they are separate from the Earth and can shape it their will. Powerful stuff!

Ten days ago I walked through this community. I stopped, because I knew that I wasn’t leaving. And here I am.