Across traditions and centuries, the making of beautiful things has been understood as participation in something larger than the maker — not necessarily divine in any doctrinal sense, but exceeding the merely personal. The creative act at its most serious tends to produce this experience: the sense that the work arrived rather than was manufactured, that the maker was doing something other than executing a plan. Whether this is metaphysically true or psychologically so may be a distinction without much practical meaning for the maker in the moment of making.
Each step builds on the last.