Creativity and a Doodle Loaf

The other day while sorting through the shelves in the kitchen I found a container labeled 'snickerdoodle dry'. It appeared to be the dry portion of a snickerdoodle cookie recipe. Yum! I had a vague memory of making snickerdoodle cookies some months ago and setting aside some of the ingredients for later. I thought, "Hmm, it's raining out today. I'll use this flour mixture to make some snickerdoodles." I set about adding the rest of the ingredients. Well something perplexing happened and the mixture ended up being too wet for cookies so I put it into a bread pan to make a loaf instead. I had some pecans in the cabinet so I added them on top with more butter, sugar and cinnamon (as I had been trying to make cinnamon cookies). It turned out wonderfully and Joe named it Doodle Loaf. It was a moment of creativity in action where something new and delicious was formed. Now maybe you don't bake and maybe you don't consider yourself creative, but I bet you are making new and valuable things all of the time out of inspiration, mistakes, and a sense of possibility. Creativity is nothing short of life itself when we step into the unknown through a conversation with a friend, a project at work, a garden, or a new craft. Your whole life is a creative project where you make something new and valuable everyday from necessity, blunders, and optimism. In any creative endeavor (and in life) we don't always know what will happen and sometimes we fail. Last fall I made apple pie with juicy apples from the Pudding Creek orchard. It turned out the pie was an inedible mess of leathery dry apples and hard, tooth cracking crust. We fail sometimes and the future is uncertain, but don't let that stop you from creating because sometimes you might end up with something wonderful like a Doodle Loaf.