In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a forgotten speech by one of the most original minds and brightest spirits of the past century.

On Valentine’s Day 1971, a year after the publication of her classic Centering, the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an arts festival in Maine. Going “from horticulture to alchemy to the history of consciousness, with a few poems sprinkled in, and relying heavily on paradox,” the address she delivered, later included in The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, imaginative, and articulate investigations of creativity I have encountered — a bold defiance of the fracturing of culture anchored in the passionate insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it is “made up of differences, uniquenesses, in a tissue of relationships, interactions, interpenetrations.”

At the center of her cosmogony of creativity are the connections between the life of the individual human being and the life of the universe; between the inner invisible realm, which she calls “the force,” and the outer visible realm of its manifestation, which she calls the “the flower”; between the different fields of study and work through which we explore these realms. She writes:

Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.

This feeling, Richard observes, is what we call creativity — the mystery to which we try to give shape in matter — and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. She considers the force by which the cabbage flowers:

Cabbage… grows a big heart. Out of this heart come leaves. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. The cabbage gets its leaves from the inside, where there aren’t any. Cabbages grow from the inside, from the heart. And by growing they create their hearts.

A neurophysiologist from Yale says that brains too are created in this way: from un-brain forces. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in tissue. Like a cabbage, somehow the physical form grows from an invisible realm.

This invisible realm must be a powerfully creative region. It furnishes us not only with cabbages and brains, but with our scientific hypotheses, religious experiences, and works of art.

With the recognition that works of art begin with “a feeling for things, a feeling which is a way of knowing about things,” she adds:

We tend to call any undertaking an art when it seems to be drawing upon the fullness of inner feeling and upon careful regard for physical expression. To live and to work in the world mindful of the processes which are necessary to infuse matter with soul forces, to use techniques on behalf of living forms, is a great art.

In this sense, she observes, living itself is an art — the art of connection. Just as Erich Fromm was formulating the ideas that would become The Art of Being, Richards writes:

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don’t know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by. The verbal arts we practice, or visual arts, or graphic arts, or theater arts, or musical arts, or liberal arts, are part of something. They are not the whole story. And they are interconnected at the center with all the other parts.

Pulsating beneath this interconnected totality is the essence of all creative work. While the young Jane Goodall was contemplating the indivisibility of art and science, Richards considers what creativity in all its forms asks of us and what it gives us:

Total concentration, total focus, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process yet not knowing or demanding to know how it will come out. Many of the things we do may have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or making lab experiments, or working out a new equation, or cooking supper, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or going for a walk, or getting married, or dying.

This feeling of generative not-knowing — something the artist Ann Hamilton so beautifully articulated a generation after Richards — is also our best path to knowledge, integral to the creative process of science:

When we live in the spirit of science, we live in a quality of inquiry, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firmly balanced on the earth, finding our way on. Each step is both an answer and a question. We both know and don’t know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear the yesin the no; the no in the yes. To hear what is not said. To see what is not visible.

This, of course, is why poetry and science so naturally meet, why openness to wonder may be the best measure and the deepest meaning of our aliveness, the wellspring from which everything that is creative springs.