Unexpected Creativity

I don’t know why I absolutely had no motivation today for anything other than making a coffee cake.
I just felt in my bones that it would make my day so much better.

Then, as I mixed ingredients, I felt compelled to capture, to hold on to the texture and color of the soft lumps of sugar and butter forming rocky terrain across the bowl. While I was snapping some photographs, I realized that I was being creative. I was creating. Not just an edible something, but also a record of the experience, noticing the small things, like the complexity of a grain of sugar, the mystery of egg refusing to mix with milk without the force of a beating fork, the contrasting color of spilt cinnamon against the granite of the counter.
Perhaps this is what The Artist’s Way (by Julia Cameron) means about living creatively—that it is the natural order of things; we just have to remember what that feels like. I love it—it makes me feel less unproductive, to see writing a beautiful e-mail to a friend, photographing a baking experience, putting things in order, mixing a salad for lunch, as part of my creative life.