First Post: Empowering the Creative Flow

This blog is a place to record the creative journey, well, my journey towards that "fertile flow". You know, the juicy spot that is seeping with authentic, colorful projects, be they gardens to plant, drawings to color, walls to paint, or socks to knit...But we are not always in this space of feeling in touch with our creative process. And here in winter it is often the case for me that I feel more internal and less able to express myself and creativity outwards.

And as a woman also drawn to the healing arts, I am interested in recording how creativity heals the spirit and the body. I know from experience that bringing something that lives inside of me out into the world, through accessing that creative space in my heart/soul untaps a force that the every day world does not find time to explain or support. "The replanted, rewoven female soul sets loose a fecund spirit inside us. We grow fertile with new words, new ideas, new consciousness, new lyricism, new energy. Our journey deposits psychological or spiritual energy (empowerment) into our internal banks. As Mary Catherine Bateson points out...'The energy to write this page is released by metabolized food...But the [psychic] energy to write this page depends on my state of mind, and such 'energy' can come from a sunset or a remembered smile.'"  (Excerpt from Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a biographical account of her journey from the constraints of Christian upbringing and abidance to the sometimes frightening (because it's unknown) and freeing arms of the Sacred Feminine in her life.) She continues...

"The energy or vitality to create is engendered from the soul...The first step...is simply acknowledging our creativity. Second, we must explore it. Ask yourself, 'What is my deepest passion, the truest, most vulnerable place in your heart. Greet this answer like it is your newborn self being placed in your arms. Love it. Bond with it. Feed it. Don't push it aside, minimize, make excuses, and starve this thing of beauty, because this answer is the window into your creative life.

"Third, we need to commit to our creative path. I don't mean to want to do it in our hearts or make plans to do it. I mean to actually do it...I meet women with all kinds of dazzling projects their souls have concocted that for some reason they never get around to manifesting...Tapping the flow of the soul is only half the creative process; the other half is figuring out how to do commerce with the practical world.

"And finally, to be empowered creatively we need to understand what to do when [i]nevitably [we] get discouraged and lose creative direction or passion...When that happens, I've learned to drop down into the creative nothing. I do sacred dawdling. I turn to nature. I lie on the earth or dig in the dirt. I get still, go silent, rest, take herbal baths...The main thing is to stop struggling and nourish yourself. When you nourish yourself, your creative energy is renewed. You are able to pick up your lyre again and sing."

Kidd, alongside such contemporary women writers like Clarissa Pinkola Estes & Alice Walker guide our female souls with their fluid imagery and vibrant expression of story, be it their own or one brought forth from within or retold from without. I have turned to their stories in dark times, "dark nights of the soul", when inspiration feels a million miles away and found a connection with life and my creative spark again. I also go into the garden and watch the plants grow, ask them questions and listen for their wise, mostly brief, answers. What brings you inspiration? Where do you find the strength to push through the dark nights and birth your light out into the world?