*A note on the concept of a good life: this is not a definition but rather a description. What makes a good life in a specific place is dependent on the specific place, but through LBD’s research focusing on that which we share, certain themes kept re-emerging. These constituted the characterisation of a good life discussed below…*

‘The good life is in reach; it is a rather simple thing. Children can make a good life if you just let them get away with it.’ Michael Northcott, LBD Rannoch Meetings 2022

Creativity in this context is about use of imaginative ways to work towards shared goals. It is an actualisation of the agency element towards a shared flourishing. It is about discovering inventive ways to work with nature to achieve its own ends and working with communities to reinforce the goodness that lies within their shared vision.

Aristotle had a notion he called ‘poiesis’ coming from the Greek ‘to make’. It was based on the idea that human creativity could aid the natural world to produce more of the thing that the natural process was aimed at. As medicine, properly practiced, could help the body with health and agriculture, properly practiced, could help fields produce more wheat. This is different to when one uses human knowledge to superimpose a new purpose onto the natural world (like flattening a mountain to build on it or killing animals to turn them into clothing).

The analogy becomes clear in climactic terms, that human imagination can be used to help coincide with nature, to be colleagues in a joint project using natural and non-natural means to bring forth a joint flourishing. It is for that reason poiesis has the same root word as the modern word of ‘poetry’.

Lbd’s understanding of creativity aims this shared communality, with the natural world and with communities, aiming at an imaginative fusion towards a shared common good.