Creativity and connection: The importance of soul mates

I believe in soul mates the way Anne of Green Gables swoons over “kindred spirits”. There are some people you meet who seem to be singing to you when the rest of the room is humming in a mess of sporadic conversations.

Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I volunteer, blog, or otherwise engage in community is because I’m a lush for these kinds of connections. Above the din of the work itself, I’ve discovered a few relationships that leave me truly energized, rile my curiosity, and make me believe I’m just one part of a bigger thing, trying to reconnect myself to the whole through other people.

There are primary soul mates, like my husband Carl, who knows me more holistically than anyone ever will. And then there are secondary or supporting soul mates, with whom I connect individually in a particular area of my life, and as a whole, I would say we’re universally connected by a shared understanding of or appreciation for how the world works.

This notion of soul mates always seems to grow in importance to me as I focus on creativity. I think this is partially because I need human connection to tackle creativity. I’ve learned that I can’t do it alone. When I create in isolation, I start to replace my creative outlets with more practical ones. Before I even realize I’ve made this decision (because it’s not a decision – it just happens), my creative side is quiet again.

I guess I’m learning that relationships are an important part of my creative process. Tania, one of my closest friends from college, is teaching me this. I e-mail her one afternoon wondering what’s wrong with me, and she replies telling me exactly what it is. She lives on the other side of the state, and she’s given up on calling me because I hate the telephone and never call anyone back. Yet a couple times a week, through Twitter or our blogs or e-mail, we have these moments where I feel like we must still brush our teeth together in the community bathroom on the third floor of Phillips Hall.

I didn’t know it when we sat next to each other through Diane Wakoski’s grueling critiques of our poetry, but Tania is one of my creative soul mates.

I’m positive you can’t “find” soul mates. You can only put yourself in situations where you are accessible to these connections. This is why soul mates are not the same thing as community, and vice versa. There are many online communities where the whole point is to connect with others who have a shared concern or passion. But connection is not the only variable in being creative, supportive soul mates.

Similarly, inspiration is not the only variable. Inspiration comes from your muse, if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe real people can be muses too – there was a woman in one of my poetry classes in college who had a beautiful name, who read with the most humble, plant-me-in-the-ground-and-I’d-grow-sunflowers voice, whose life experience seemed so big and wise for her being so young. But we rarely talked. She was not a creative soul mate, although I found her incredibly inspiring.

A creative soul mate is a hybrid of these qualities, but with a level of intuition added to the mix. You connect, you inspire each other, but soul mates have an innate ability to anticipate one another. This is what makes the relationship impossible to predict or plan. It is your intuition about what the other person believes, and your sense that it aligns with your own beliefs, that makes you sigh “oh, we’re kindred spirits” like Anne of Green Gables.

Now that I’ve noodled through this and started to take inventory of the other kinds of soul mates in my life, my inevitable next question is: what can I do with them? Maybe they are not a relationship to be managed – maybe I shouldn’t levy that kind of expectation, just like I can’t “find” a soul mate. But I do wonder what the potential creative results are if I am more intentional about building relationships with the creative soul mates I do have?