There are creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they have been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.
A mature creative life, which has discovered its source, finds it is linked to everything. Creation actually requires too little from us, and there is not much in our culture that teaches us to pay attention to the things that require less. These things give birth to the unpredictable surprises that inspire a larger and deeper soul connection with creative life. With the soul well tended, even when all is lost, our creation lives larger than its physical limits. The best that any of us can do with the heaven and hell that surrounds us is to become willing participants in the unfolding of our soul's life. Any creative act emerging from this tending becomes one with the elements of the Mystery.
Teilhard de Chardin's knowledge of himself in the Silence is powerfully described in the DIVINE MILIEU:
We must try to penetrate our most secret self, and examine our being from all sides. Let us try, patiently, to perceive the ocean of forces to which we are subjected and in which our growth is, as it were, steeped ... And so, for the first time in my life perhaps (although I am supposed to meditate every day!), I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventual, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet ... and, if someone saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel speaking to me from the depth of the night: ego sum, noli timere ... It is I, be not afraid!