Every week I meet with a client who immediately delights and uplifts me with her creativity. We meet on zoom. Each session she puts a magnificent photo from a different country in the background behind her. One week we are in Scotland. Another in Greece. And it’s always a surprise. Such a simple use of her creativity and imagination to launch us out of lockdown and have us travel the world.
“I know so many people who say with conviction, “I am just not creative.” That is like saying, “I am alive, but I do not breathe.” Creativity is the life force itself. We are creating in each moment, in our thoughts and actions. Setting the table for dinner is creation. Problem-solving a challenging situation is creativity.
I arrive in Michigan to write, on my own little private writer’s retreat in the midst of a severe weather advisory. The wind is fierce. It is loud and powerful and I can’t believe the little yachts in the harbor aren’t being picked up in a funnel cloud and taken to Oz. The four Weeping Willows outside my window are dancing like Sufi trance dervishes. I’m glad they can’t have a heart attack, because the wind just won’t let them rest. Will they be bald before their time? They are not ready to lose their leaves, and as the gusts sweep them to and fro lustfully, almost abusively, they hold on and their sweeping branches become even more flexible than ever, because they have to in order to survive this force. I worry about my old magnolia back in Chicago. Will she be able to weather this powerful storm?” -excerpts in quotes and italics are from my book Beyond the Bookclub: We are the Books We Must Read
How will we weather the present daily storms we are living through? Even the Covid19 virus releases a cytokine storm inside our own bodies. Storms are everywhere. Scientists and innovators of all kinds spend each day calling upon their connection with the Creative Force to heal us and the planet. Actually, we must each call upon our own connection with the Creative Force to meet each day anew.
“The outside reflects the inside. As within, so without. Why has this storm come to me this day, as I beckon my own creative force to surface? How is this nasty windstorm like my creativity? It is dark and scary. It can’t be stopped until it stops. It arrives unexpectedly. It sometimes feels like the angry breath of Goddess, and I can’t hide from it, though I may try. Sometimes it appears at three a.m. and floods me with ideas and won’t let me sleep. Sometimes it hides from me. It has great impact. It will run its course and then it will return when you least expect it. It is very noisy. Then it is quiet and discreet. Has the storm ended? Oh no. Here it comes again. The building is shaking from it, and even with windows closed, I can hear it wailing, and moaning, and roaring. It is strong in its expression, varied, teasing, and bombast. I wonder how the birds navigate it, but they do. They seem to ride it like a surfer on the ocean, becoming at one with it and not questioning or resisting where it will take them. It never seems to tire. As night descends, before my very eyes the lights on the harbor flicker, as the wind demands their obedience as well. It is overwhelming and invigorating. I was cold when I started writing this, and now I am very, very hot.
This is the Creative Force in at least one of her many forms. She brings about movement, manifestation, some destruction, that ultimately makes room for reconstruction. She is birth and death and birth. She digs away at the unseen.”
How can you call upon the Creative Force today? Can you dance? Can you sing? Can you take a walk and pick up some nature objects for your altar? Can you make a snow person? Can you make a sand castle depending on where you live? Can you make up a new recipe from leftovers? Can you dress up as if you are going somewhere special even if you are alone at home? Any intentional act that you recognize as a connection to your creativity brings with it a higher vibration and moves our energy. A brilliant art process teacher, Michelle Cassou, says in her French accent- “Creativity is like Draino. It clears out the stuck places.”
A client of mine who is in college said something that stunned me. I thought about it all week. He said, “I feel like I have nothing to look forward to.” He was so right. What lies ahead for any of us? What will be the new normal? And yet we have our imagination. We have our dreams. We have access to the Creative Force to lift us from powerlessness to something grand, even for the moment.
“Creativity can be capricious, fleeting, and sometimes hard to tame. It arrives, like the windstorm, when it wants to. I must open myself and wait patiently, intentionally, for its next visit, like a faithful lover. I must turn myself toward it. No amount of discipline can command its presence, or control how long it stays. But when it comes through the door, its dance is so delicious, so entertaining, that time stands still. I am not young or old, infirm or healthy. I am all that is- at one with the words, or the colors, the textures, the light and the dark, the ugly and the beautiful. There is no preference, just the movement of the wind through my soul.”
Why not try to crack open the door intentionally to some creativity today? See what just might get healed.