What’s It For?

Creating your existence

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering “What’s it for? — Robert Fulghum

Creativity is what rattles my cage! Crayon flower gardens, imaginative hours in the cardboard kitchen, and oreo cookie frosting baked into delicious cakes decorated with the outer cookie shells. All for my Mom to make her smile!

All before kindergarten, my dad passed away, my mom remarried, and we moved to California. Once I entered kindergarten, life changed drastically. But isn’t that where we supposedly learn everything we needed to know about existing in this world. Living within thoughts of sharing and kindness, the miracles of seeds planted in a cup, and balancing your day with music, dancing, drawing, painting, and playing. Learn some, work some, and create fun and beauty. Some harsh realities of life clouded my learning.

Each of these realities became a bar to trap and contain my existence under standards, expectations, and unobtainable heights. The more they grew, the more I hid. My creativity and intuition became the silent soldiers that protected my existence.

They had a way of infusing themselves into my life as the tricky soldiers that they are. It wasn’t the same as imagination but an uncanny knack for changing one thing into another entirely different version.

Within my cage, I struggled with visualizing a concept from scratch. However, you give me an existing picture, thought, prompt, or problem, and my ideas ran rampant, creatively blending things into a mixed bag of tricks, repurposing old realities into magical dreams and visions.

At a point, the hollering became louder, and the rattling of my cage seemingly synchronized the dance. Within my creations and ideas, I felt like a misfit of human existence. However, the top secrets of my soldiers began to build a new army. An army that skipped over trying to fit into the societal definition of existence. My intuition leads the way of syncing the energies and waiting for me if only I would listen to the whispers within instead of the yelling of others.

My creativity turned that shaking and rattling into artistic expressions from the ink flow, whether it be a journey of words or simple dots in a pointillism picture. Connecting each dot or loop to the next mark of ink formed into an escape path through the space between the cage bars. That space created the direction of small actions of honor and respect for my creativity and intuition soldiers. Stepping stones of sharing my moments in time and hoping to catch the attention of others who might need another way to think beyond their bars and put action behind the perpetual question of “What’s it all for?”

Sometimes, we choose to stay in the cage as it represents comfort, but Maya Angelou is a prime example of a member of the army of creativity.

“There is no greater agony than bearing the untold stories inside of you!” -Maya Angelou.

So keep singing those songs, writing those stories, moving in those dances, and painting those pictures that represent your beautiful existence. Freedom awaits those who follow the larger army of human voices who infuse greater meaning beyond the bars of the cage.

Note: The inspiration came from another member of the army of human voices, Aswin, who prompted us to explore the element of our existence!