Utterly Unaligned Creativity
Nurture the Melon
It can be very hard for people to give themselves both the time and the space, both physical and mental, to create. It can be even harder to make time and space for self care systems. Fortunately these two things can become one.
Creativity as a healing modality, in the way that it opens us to the present tense, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, can sustain us for a very long time. But what if we can’t allow ourselves to even try to create?
I really do believe that walking, swimming and meditation can be a doorway into creating, as they float all sorts of buried dreams up to the surface.
Once you’ve begun moving and meditating, another way to begin a dialogue with yourself can be to start a journal. It can be hard to just come to this cold, which is why I suggest the other concepts first.
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a good resource if you feel stuck for a way to begin writing. She suggests writing 3 pages every day, pretty well automatically, and in the process of doing this it’s possible to open up feelings and thoughts that are subterraneally locking us up.
I know I was thinking about trying to create for many years before I began. As a child I’d drawn obsessively, I’d carried around a satchel of stories I was writing and used to make up songs which I would sing under my breath because to draw attention to myself did not feel comfortable. By the time I was at high school I had stopped doing these things, because I believed I would never be good enough.
Over the past year I’ve been talking to groups of people about healing with creativity. Many of them are professional people, and artists who had completed degrees in Fine Arts, and entered the work force in various art-related careers. Most of them are looking for a way to reconnect with their creativity.
It helps to be prepared for creativity…to have whatever media, or variety of media you want to explore, on hand…and to allocate a space in your home for just you, even if it’s only a small corner.
You could begin with paints, or pencils, markers, anything that appeals to you.
To begin with I had a piece of cardboard, some oil paints, which were almost completely dried out, and a crushed and more or less broken, dried out old paint brush, a brush I would consider pretty useless now…plus an old dinner plate to mix the paint. These days I have drying medium, linseed oil, canvases, brushes, an easel, and a room dedicated to this kind of thing. I still use an old dinner plate though…no matter how practical a palette is, for some reason this suits me better…
Engaging in creativity doesn’t just and only have to be a conduit for becoming an artist…it could be, but more importantly is to begin this deeper relationship with yourself, which is not about any end product at all.
I watched a film about Eva Hesse recently…it’s really worth seeing; interesting, and also very sad at times. She had a very difficult life, being evacuated from Germany as a child of 3, at the beginning of WW2, being separated from her parents for more than a year, and losing all her extended family in concentration camps.
But even though there was a sense of the darkness from which she had emerged, the thing that stood out most was her devotion to creativity. She was driven and ambitious, but she was also very exploratory. She wanted to create something that reflected the absurdity of the world we find ourselves in. She began as a painter, then moved into sculpture which was where she found her most unique expression.
She says: “My interest is in finding solely my own way. I don’t mind being miles away from everyone else”…in my first newsletter I quoted Eva, it’s a quote I often think about if I feel stuck, or overwhelmed by the outside world.
She says: “The hell with them all….paint yourself out, through and though, it will come by you alone. You must come to terms with your own work not with any other being.”
This singular approach feels very similar to David Lynch, who took such a deep dive into Eraserhead, that almost no one could follow him. He kept moving through without knowing exactly where it was going…and he famously searched the Bible in a moment of desperation, for some meaning as to what he was doing. He found a passage that gave him what he wanted, but was never willing to tell anyone else what that passage was.
This disinclination to reveal this inspirational passage to others is really a huge gift…He’s saying the only way is to dig deep into ourselves, and he offers certain road signs along the way…meditation, reading of inspirational texts, following intuitive paths suggested to you, as far as they go…always in deep gratitude. After his death Laura Dern in her published letter to him said:
“Everything to you was some universal conspiracy to make the art that much more true”.
As if the universe was conspiring to collaborate with his vision. And it probably was.
It’s lovely to to evoke this philosophy with our lives. Becoming aware of signs and visions, feeling the sacredness of the spaces we enter…in nature and in human spaces…listening for other dimensions wherever we are.
I sometimes wonder about all of the people who never have the confidence or the self belief to draw out of themselves the things that make them unique, to find their voice…in a way this is all of us…because it’s so easy to categorize ourselves and then suddenly we’re sitting in a box, afraid to see what lies beyond. It’s like we’re tricked into believing that unless we fit some kind of mould we are either of no value, or our value will be invisible…hidden behind whatever else we think is wrong with us…I needed a framework to begin with, in order to feel safe…I had been teetering so dangerously for a long time, and grabbing a concept and running with it was freeing at the time.
But imagine a world in which utterly unaligned, totally unexpected creativity was just bursting out everywhere…or blooming secretly, until you come around a corner and just see it…
The reason I started this newsletter was because I realized that the most important thing that had happened since I started painting was the healing process which had begun from that first day of making a very rudimentary face. It was totally unexpected. I think I believed making art would be painful…but it never was. There were times when I felt in the grip of dark feelings, but having been in those most of my life this wasn’t anything new…but the actual act of painting, mixing paint and also dreaming up visions to paint was a joy, and still is.
Recently I started writing a new book. Somewhere I still have that old satchel with a few of my original stories, from when I was 12. At the moment I have several on the go…some sci fi, fantasy, and other ideas. These things are like my secret melon which I talked about in an earlier newsletter, The Dream Filled Shadows.
The secret melon is something for you alone…something you don’t have to expect to “finish” but something to love, in a way that you may not exactly love yourself yet. It doesn’t have to be a book, or writing of any kind, it could even be just a feeling.
What I enjoy about writing in this way is that I don’t have to treat it in a linear way at all…I can write when I feel moved to, and I find as long as I’m doing all of my self care stuff that ideas keep coming to me for the various characters in my stories.
It’s fun to do something totally for yourself. “It is a blessing from heaven”, as the iching puts it. Think of it as that dream you have when you’re awake that doesn’t involve your brain, but is like a pathway leading you into some other part of yourself. No one but you can bring that dream to life…no one can tell you how it should be…and you may not ever need to show it to another living soul. Treasure it and watch it thrive
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