Creative convergence

In the middle of term 3 I received a phone call from Jason Marsden, Centre Manager at The Hub, telling me that I was one of four recipients of this year's 'Proud to be' awards for Hornby. The awards, based on community nomination, celebrate individuals who the nominators feel have contributed to the community in their own special ways. The programme, in its fourth year, has been the 'brain child' of Jason and the team at The Hub.

My first response (and that of the other three nominees, I suspect) was very much 'surely not? why me?".

We received an exceptionally generous gift of clothing from fashion stores via The Hub, and strutted the catwalk along with other community members modelling fashion from around The Hub. 

I wrote a poem (you can read it at the end of this post) in which I tried to capture my feelings (and possibly those of each of the three of us). I have met with the other three recipients, also with Lyn and Jason from The Hub team, and Vicki the stylist and 'imaginator extraordinaire' ( I think I've just created a new word, right there). They are all amazing people, and the sense of humility I continue to feel from having been connected with all of them is deep and profound. But I have struggled to 'make sense ' of the award, and the event, since then. 

In making sense of it all, I thought about my conversations with Jason. With a physics degree under his belt he was drawn into promotions and retail management (as you do, apparently). He is a creative person, sharing with me some of his personal journey as a craft metal worker and blacksmith, and his more recent work in designing, and taking to market, an amazing wrist watch stand. Jason combines that with an astute business sense, and a strong moral imperative to 'do the right thing' for people.

Jason taking to the catwalk himself at the 2022 'Proud to be' show.

I was also mindful of conversations with Lyn and Vicki too, professionals who engage their 'creative muscle' daily in their mahi. It took me back to my own time in previous lives in which the development of creative promotions solutions was part and parcel of our daily mahi. Creative thinking often had to be 'to the fore'.

Where did all of this leave me? It left me thinking about the underlying need for creativity in our lives, about the power of creativity to impact positively on people, and also about what the possibilities might be when we connect creatively within and across the different parts of our lives, and across sectors of the community.

I am trying to understand the synergies that might exist for joint action between a community kura and its local shopping centre (or local business more generally) that might better support creativity. I have seen many initiatives tried and failed in the past. Mentors from local businesses, requests for funding for student activities, such things generally with a small impact which fades to nothing rather quickly once the individual who initiated the idea has moved on. I seem to have stumbled across these thoughts:

• The connections we do make need to be authentic and I suspect rather more spontaneous and situational. 
• There is unlikely to be much that applies universally across kura and communities, but rather will depend on the strengths and inclinations of each community and its members
• Despite that, I 'reckon' that creativity is a great basis on which to forge connections

This is the creative convergence to which I was referring in the title to this post.

Of course this all depends on there being people in your community who value creativity. In our case Jason is one such person - he values and practices it (and as I have said, he acts with a strong sense of moral purpose). Interesting isn't it that he should have around him others who similarly are creative by nature and habit. What a coincidence!! (sarcasm circuits switched on, yes). Of COURSE it's no coincidence. Jason gathers around himself people who similarly value creativity, who practice it in their daily lives. The existence of a 'creatives' programme at The Hub is NO coincidence. This builds vibrant communities, this builds communities that flourish and thrive, communities filled with individuals who support one another, individuals who are prepared to take risks.  I used the word 'thrive', and I used it deliberately and intentionally. THAT is our ultimate purpose surely. Profits, educational attainment, whatever the short term outcome, the capacity, the opportunity, to thrive is THE most important thing (I reckon!!). Isn't that why societies exist?

Our vision for our kāhui ako cluster is ""Inspiring Futures: Collaborating for Hauora & Success".  When we discuss hauora we use the terms flourishing and thriving, referring as we do the Selligman 'PERMA' model as our guide, within the context of Te Whare Tapa Whā.

I am currently reading the latest book by Professor Peter O'Connor and Claudia Rozas Gōmez 'Slow Wonder', and these words resonated:

Perhaps what frightens so many about the imagination is that it might be no more than an invisible tincture with enormous power to bring about elemental change. Perhaps it is the essence of the magnus opus, the great work that ancient alchemists understood could heal the sick and transform the searcher into a perfect philosopher. We might then understand the imagination as the elixir of life, the powder that keeps us as wise as children, that makes us live beyond our death in the art we make. For the imagination lifts us out of the everyday and turns the greyness of life a golden hue. Is the imagination, then, the means by which we might achieve life’s purpose, as Paolo Freire suggests, of becoming more fully human? James Hillman writes:

We must start, as [the alchemist] Benedictus Figulus says, in the caelum, the sky-blue firmament over our heads, the mind already in the blue of heaven, imagination opened. The blue caelum of imagination gives to the opus a rock- hard standpoint from above downward, just as firm and solid as literal physical reality. A sapphire stone already at the beginning.6 

Creativity is one of life's forces. It makes us human.  

 

How much more empathetic, how much kinder, would we be as a society if we acknowledged the power of creativity, if in action we showed that we truly valued creativity, if we nurtured creativity in whatever shape of form it exists in each of us (because it surely does)?

And so we come full circle to our Hornby High school Manaiakalani kaupapa (Learn, Create, Share) and our kura vision 'he puna auaha, a centre of creative excellence'. We are not about being ordinary, about 

supporting and sustaining the status quo. We are about being extraordinary, about getting back to the essence of our 'being', our purpose, about school, system, and societal, change. 

Lofty ideals, at a time when we need them!! I WANT to boil the ocean. 

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The poem (imagine this with a Sam Hunt voice):