Silence

“Compost is stuff, junk, garbage, anything, that’s turned into dirt by sitting around a while. It involves silence, darkness, time, and patience. From compost, whole gardens grow”
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016, p. 110).

It is not a stretch to view Le Guin’s compost and gardens as the creative process and suggest that creativity involves silence in some form. I guess many will intuitively agree that creativity requires occasional silence, and silence is also attributed to creativity by scholars with statements such as “pregnant with possibilities, a source of creativity” (Bigo, 2018, p. 122). Silence positions us a listeners. Listening is seemingly passive - and even more so listening when there is nothing to listen to - and thus easily deemed unproductive in a world obsessed with products. Maintaining silence, not rushing to produce, prove, and make yourself heard – refraining for a while to be creative, thus allows for more subtle input. Silence, then, can allow for piling up things easily ignored or discarded as of no relevance. I can assist a playful accumulation of ideas, sensations, and information that may, when time is ripe, combine in ways like never before - that is, creativity as the result of learning from or re-creating existing processes and materials (Tanggaard & Wegener, 2016).