{"id":49841,"date":"2026-09-20T15:25:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T15:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/are-you-working-in-defense-of-the-invisible-labors-of-creativitiy\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T15:25:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T15:25:43","slug":"are-you-working-in-defense-of-the-invisible-labors-of-creativitiy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/are-you-working-in-defense-of-the-invisible-labors-of-creativitiy\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Are<\/a><\/p>\n

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes. <\/p>\n

Another time, on the train with a poet friend, none of the other passengers could have known that behind her faraway look she was doing the invisible labor that would eventually win her the Pulitzer.<\/p>\n

\u201cArtists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are,\u201d the visionary theater director Andr\u00e9 Gregory wrote to the visionary photographer Richard Avedon in his courageous antidote to the Cartesian myth of work\/life balance<\/a>. \u201cThey are like plants growing in winter. You can\u2019t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

We call the titans of creativity \u201cvisionaries\u201d precisely because their work is a kind of subterranean vision that only the inner eye can see, indiscernible to any surface observer until it takes a tangible shape \u2014 be it a poem or a theorem \u2014 that touches the world, that changes it. <\/p>\n

Leo Lionni<\/a> (May 5, 1910\u2013October 11, 1999) offers a timeless defense of this invisible, vital work in Frederick<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his 1968 philosophical postulate disguised as a children\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Leo Lionni<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A wartime refugee from Holland, Lionni went on to become one of America\u2019s most beloved writers and illustrators of children\u2019s books \u2014 more than forty of them in his long life (along with innumerable drawings, paintings, and sculptures of wood, metal, and glass), taking on the largest questions of what it means to be alive with extraordinary subtlety masked as simplicity.<\/p>\n

A decade after Little Blue and Little Yellow<\/em><\/a> \u2014 which he wrote for his own grandkids \u2014 offered a foundational understanding of color that went on to influence generations of graphic designers and artists, Frederick<\/em> offered a foundational understanding of creativity \u2014 the mightiest defense of the imagination since William Blake\u2019s famous letter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well before philosopher Bernard Suits subverted Aesop\u2019s famous fable<\/a> to make the grasshopper its hero, not its fool, by demonstrating that play is more rewarding than productivity, Lionni\u2019s kindred story insists that creativity \u2014 the key to which Einstein termed \u201ccombinatory play\u201d<\/a> \u2014 nourishes more deeply than consumption. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We meet a family of field mice living in a stone wall, working day and night to gather food in preparation for winter \u2014 all but one. As the rest toil, Frederick stands still and quiet, staring into space. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFrederick, why don\u2019t you work?\u201d they ask. <\/p>\n

\u201cI do<\/em> work,\u201d he answers.<\/p>\n

He is, rather, laboring \u2014 I am thinking of Lewis Hyde\u2019s timeless distinction between work and labor<\/a>. Frederick is laboring at a lighthouse for dark times<\/a>: It is not food he is gathering but light and color, images and ideas \u2014 those immaterial mercies that make life at its coldest and harshest more livable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When winter does come, the mice huddle between the stones and begin feasting on their cache, chatting happily about inconsequential things. But little by little, the food runs out, the conversation hollows, and they begin wondering about Frederick\u2019s gatherings. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He instructs them to close their eyes, and suddenly there is magic \u2014 his words conjure up light and color in their marveled minds, sealed with a verse he speaks from atop a stone, doing what all artists ultimately do \u2014 open the door to the mystery of what it means to be alive:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Who scatters snowflakes? Who melts the ice?
\nWho spoils the weather? Who makes it nice?
\nWho grows the four-leaf clovers in June?
\nWho dims the daylight? Who lights the moon?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stephen Hawking was asking the same with his eternal question: \u201cWhat is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?\u201d Frederick\u2019s answer reminds us that we may never know what created us, but that creative force is in us, of us \u2014 the divine within:<\/p>\n

\n

Four little field mice who live in the sky,
\nFour little field mice\u2026 like you and I.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When Frederick finishes his verse, the other field mice suddenly realize that he is a poet, that he had been doing the poet\u2019s work all along \u2014 all through those still silent hours when he appeared to be doing nothing, he was wresting meaning from the bewilderment of being alive, finding the words to praise the brief miracle of it. <\/p>\n

Pulsating beneath the story is a reminder that whether the poem is made of words or of mathematics, it is only ever made in the mind \u2014 that strange and solitary place<\/a> where ideas are born like new stars out of the fertile cosmic darkness, molecules of thought pulled together by the gravity of feeling to become light. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes. Another time, on the train with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 11:19:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}