What We Need Is Here
On my bookshelf sits a well-thumbed book: The Accidental Creative – How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice. It’s filled with practical tools for generating ideas more consistently and tapping into creativity under pressure. It’s an interesting and helpful read. But sometimes, even with all the right books and tools at hand, creativity still runs dry.
More than once this year, I found myself utterly depleted, out of ideas, out of inspiration. My creative well had run dry. Used up. Exhausted.
Then I rediscovered the wooden bench in my garden.
In the quiet early hours of the day, if I sit very still, I can feel the sun’s soft rays playing on my back. Around the same time, my cat climbs onto my lap, and a little green sugar-bird hovers near the neighboring Protea bush, sipping its nectar. In the late afternoon, that same bench becomes a front-row seat to the birds’ last conversations of the day, as the trees turn a warm pink in the setting sun.
And it was here, in this stillness, that I realised something important: my ideas hadn’t disappeared—they had simply hidden behind the wall of busyness. They were waiting, shyly, just around the corner, for a moment of calm.
I had forgotten to check in with the true source of creativity: the Master Artist, the One who created heaven and earth… and me.
So often we believe that doing more, saying more, connecting more will get us there—to that better, more inspired place. But more often than not, it’s in the stillness of doing less, saying less, and connecting less that we truly find what we’re looking for.
Because everything we need is already here, with Jesus.
He reminds us of this in Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you. I’ll tell you marvelous and wondrous things that you could never figure out on your own.” (The Message)
To every client, colleague, and friend—thank you for making this year meaningful. You’ve reminded me again that what we need isn’t far away. It’s not out there. It’s already here.
I leave you with a few lines from Wendell Berry’s poem, What We Need Is Here:
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
May you have a blessed festive season. May you find rest, renewal, and the quiet joy of knowing that the creative spark you’re searching for is already within you. What you need is here.
With love,
Liesl
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