Last night, just before I fell asleep with my Airpods still in, I listened to a short TED Talk about what it means to keep on creating in a world that feels like it’s on fire.

Every one of us was born to make things, it said. Mostly, we think of artists as a small group of gifted people – they paint the canvases, write the poems, publish the books. But the truth is, each of us carries the ability to create. Each of us can bring something into the world that wasn’t there before – something the world needs.

It might be a meal that brings people together. It might be a flower arrangement from our garden. It might be a space where someone feels safe. A handwritten note delivered at the right time. A gesture of kindness.

Whatever it is, whatever you personally offer – large or small – it’s so easy to think that these acts don’t matter all that much. But, in fact, they matter more than ever now. This is how we lift one another up, especially in difficult times.

I only have to look at my own circle of friends to see how much it means. In our little circle, creativity has begun showing up in ways that are ordinary and extraordinary all at once.

There’s me, writing and making art to make sense of life’s complicated and beautiful truths. It’s the only kind of meditation I do. There’s Charlene, baking bread and painting her music onto the canvas of the world, letting her imagination spill past the edges, then sitting down to teach piano to a dear friend – sharing her joy as freely as she creates it. That friend, who we connected with originally because of a piece of I wrote, then gathers the courage to let her fingers find the keys and to learn, in front of us. And there’s another friend who is once again writing and sharing poetry, searching for clarity and trusting that truth often reveals itself one line at a time.

There’s something just so deeply human about it all. This little circle of women, cheering one another on as we each try – in our own small ways – to put a bit more goodness into the world.

It’s easy to see how hard times can narrow our view, how they can make the horizon feel closer and more limited than it truly is. But these women remind me that beauty – and the simple act of offering something good to the world – can stretch that horizon wide again. These small moments of creation we spark in one another feel a lot like the sunrise. They have their own gentle will. They don’t ask for permission to take their place in the day; they just rise, because that’s what light does.

If you think about it, much of what we think of as art – poems, paintings, sculptures, songs – began as resistance of some kind. Each one born of struggle – internal or otherwise. And in the end, they were an act of pushing back. Against inertia. Against fear or sadness. Against the forces that tell us to shrink. To stay silent. To accept the world exactly as it is.

We’ve lived through other moments when the world felt like it was burning – through wars, through upheaval, through seasons of deep uncertainty – and art did not disappear. In fact, it did the opposite. It rose up. Making things has always been a form of resistance: a fist made of light, cutting clean through to the truth.

And people have created as an act of resilience, insisting that human possibility is bigger than whatever darkness we’re walking through. What they made challenged despair, carved out a little space for hope, and let them imagine a future brighter than the one right in front of them.

Making is courage in brushstrokes or a flower garden, rebellion wrapped in melody or Sunday supper. It’s a mirror and a lantern at the same time. It motivates us. Inspires us. Mobilizes us. And it’s not just the domain of poets and painters alone. It belongs to any of us who dares to imagine something better, even when the evidence around us for such things feels thin. Especially when it does.

That’s creating too. Dreaming is creating. Choosing hope over cynicism is creating.

As I laid there listening to the podcast last night, I realized something: maybe this creative streak I’ve been riding over the past year – this sudden urgency to make, to write, to paint – wasn’t a distraction from my angst about the world, as I first assumed. Maybe it’s been my response to it. A way of placing one small thing on the table that says: Here. This is what I can offer. This is the one thing I can do that pushes back against the dark.

Make art. Make a poem. Make a meal for someone who needs it. Make a space where people feel safe. Give of yourself. Make time to listen. Make room for wonder. Make or do some small, good thing that nudges the world a little closer to what it could be. Do it well. Do it badly. Just do it.

Begin.

It might not save the world. But creating beauty, through what you make or do out there, is a protest too. To keep making these small, generous offerings. To learn what every wounded, hopeful human eventually learns – that even the tiniest act of creation can, at least, be a way of saving yourself.