Creativity

I think that creative is the word of the day.

This period of my life seems to be filled with highly creative people.

I live with 3 Ukrainian artists. We all have permission to just create as we feel led.

A lot of our guests leave a traditional gift of a bottle of vodka. Since none of us really feel like drinking hard liquor on any regular basis I began filling bottles of vodka with fruits. Vodka preserves anything forever, and will absorb the taste slowly over a couple of weeks.

I have a bottles of pear, apple, and raspberry flavored vodka sitting on the top shelf in the kitchen. While I was on vacation another addition made it's way up to the shelf. A cigarette stub flavored vodka. Soon small pebble vodka joined the others.

One of our walls is covered in newspapers. It felt like the right thing to do. In the same way that if felt right to have an impromptu photo session one night. We host about a dozen people each week. All for free. It's for the experience, the insight, the education, (and for my hopelessly romantic roommate it's also for the possibility of love) and the atmosphere. Having a dozen different voices weigh in on matters great and small creates an aroma or congeniality that can't be compared.

And tonight, after our first English Club open mic night, I sat in the main room of the Youth to Jesus student center and I was overwhelmed by the amount of creativity that surrounds me.

I don't attract the most serious students. They can pay big money and have a teacher list grammar rules at them for an hour. I attract an odd subset of Ukrainians. 25-30 students show up each week. They are artsy and fun - lively and vivacious. They want to learn English, but I think that more than that they crave some type of community.

The students played their instruments in every corner of the great room. Their almost prodigious talent was a little bit overwhelming. Fingers flew on the keys of the piano and hands strummed guitars. A boy picked up the bow of a violin for the first time and had a good number of notes under his belt in a few minutes. The flautist and the pianist began arranging duets.

I'm starting to wonder how I can capture this energy and use it for good.

I guess I need to get a little creative.