| "The creative process is a problem-solving mechanism, unique in its ability to coordinate and integrate both hemispheres of the brain into an optimally functioning state.. The left brain is the apparent locus of orderly, sequential thinking and the right brain is the site of feelings and sensibilities. This integration of complementarily opposed capabilities is what creates an optimal mode of brain function...One can only be so good and so successful operating on technique and logic alone. Understand the edge that intuition offers the best lawyer, doctor, plumber, or politician. Artists are an extraordinary reservoir of creative problem solvers for society, and even a rather mediocre artist can be extremely effective at training and inspiring others in the use of creative problem-solving techniques..Don't support the arts to create future audiences or to "civilize" wild young men and women, but rather to unleash the creative potential of our future citizenry... The response to mental and physical rigidities needs to be fluidity and creative responsiveness. Not ideology but rather the creative process holds the best hope of affording us peace, prosperity, and national security....Moreover, if the creative process were understood as a cheap, renewable, problem-solving resource, it would be demanded as a dominant part of public school curricula. Every pupil would be studying music, sculpture, dance, acting, drawing, poetry, and writing - not to create more artists, but to nurture people in whom senses and skills operate at peak efficiency. This is how we will train the integrated and organized minds to appreciate nuance and detail and to make the creative leaps necessary to keep culture and industry vital. This is where we will find the renewable resources to produce more beautiful products, architecture, and cultural expression.....Imagine turning the powerful engine of the creative process on America itself, giving imagination free reign to re-vision what each of our institutions and economies might be like if they were reevaluated through the lens of a playful, problem-solving intelligence....The resources to make the transformation from our present-day acceptance of the mediocre to future realization of our expectations resides in skillful play with the wildness of our own minds. It is free, and readily available. The energy and discipline to transform that wildness into a glorious imagining of the present moment is the discipline and joy of the creative process "-Peter Coyote- Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century - edited by Marianne Williamson available at www.amazon.com
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