notions of creativity

“Ugh I want to write something” were the words that came to mind tonight as I was lying in bed staring across my apartment at my burnt orange couch with its purple velvet pillow and blanket made by my grandmother when I was just a baby. Writing is my safe space. To call myself a “writer” feels like the truest way to identify to others that “this is who I am.”

Because I work in “writing” so to speak, I’ve been finding it hard lately to source inspiration and dig up the motivation to sit down behind my computer screen and type out my thoughts and feelings for others to read. But I suppose that’s the case with most things in life. You can’t wait for motivation to arrive to start accomplishing the goals and dreams you want to achieve, otherwise, you might just wait forever. Sometimes, it is about pinning yourself to the desk, or wherever you find yourself creatively inspired and impassioned, to get the work done. To see through what calls to you deep in your soul. To birth your work into the world. To share your gifts with others.

We all have beautiful and unique gifts that electrify and magnetize us towards certain topics, roles, creative ideas and actions, lives, impulses, and desires. It is how we choose to respond to what is “gnawing at our souls” that to me, defines a mundane life from a creative one. Neither one is better than the other, but in order for me to be fulfilled, I must express my creativity, in everything that I do, every single day.

“Respond; that is how to clear the river…find the hidden, to coalesce intention, to focus on the desired outcome and to act in their own behalf to gain it, are the exact characteristics required for creative follow through…To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction that arise within us, and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning…Be wild; that is how to clear the river…we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life…Begin; this is how to clear the polluted river. If you’re scared, scared to fail, I say begin already, fail if you must, pick yourself up, start again. If you fail again, you fail. So what? Begin again. It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate…Protect your time; this is how to banish pollutants…Stay with it;…whether we feel strong or not, whether we feel ready or not…A true creative life burns in more ways than one…Your dreams will guide you the last part of the way - by putting your foot down, once and for all, and by saying, ‘I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression'…Protect your creative life; Practice your work every day…Craft your real work;…Insist on a balance between pedestrian responsibility and personal rapture. Protect the soul…Lay out nourishment for the creative life…time, belonging, passion, and sovereignty.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves

All for now,

All my love,

Onward.

-m