To create is to make, to design, to produce, to birth, to bring into existence.
It is making with words or line or clay or paint or movement or stitch or voice or with all the other raw materials that are transformed through the act of creation.
It is both a making and unmaking.
"Every act of creation," said Pablo Picasso, "is first an act of destruction."
Early in the pandemic, I read a piece by Sam Anderson about "The Truth of Cocoons" and what a caterpillar's experience might teach us during that period when we were quarantining. What stayed with me was Anderson's description of how annihilating that process of transformation is, the caterpillar breaking down and "basically digesting itself" and "[o]nly after this near total self-annihilation can the new growth begin."
Creation is generative or re-generating, but that becoming is also messy, hard, sometimes painful and chaotic work—and embraced (or endured, depending on the day) without the guarantee of the becoming becoming anything, so we try (sometimes more successfully than others) to find the joy and value in the process of doing, of becoming, of creating for the sake of creating.
When we create we are involved in a kind of sense-making. To make sense of ourselves and the world around us. As Joan Didion puts it, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." We come away from our projects sometimes with answers, more glimmers of understanding, but also with the knowledge that sometimes there are no answers and that the most important thing is to keep asking the questions.
To create we are giving or revealing form, but sometimes that act requires we unravel ourselves, shatter expectations of what we thought something would be so that it—and we—can become more fully ourselves.
