Photo credit: Tankowho
The Force that Creates
Spring 2015
The force that creates powerful imagery in your writing, art, and music is, quite simply, the force that creates.
In some of the most beautiful words ever written, Dylan Thomas describes this force saying that it not only drives our red blood, it ropes the blowing wind, whirls the water in the pool, and blasts the roots of trees.
I don’t think for a minute that he could have written these words if he hadn’t been able to see this pulsing life energy or experience it in some other profoundly sensual way.
This creativity exercise is about doing just that. And there is no better time to do it than springtime. Associating terms like renewal and rebirth with spring are so common place because they are so true.
For this exercise, get in touch with the life force within by doing Exercise One. Then take a walk in nature looking for this force as it bursts forth all around you. The phrases above come from a poem that begins: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Look for that as you walk – the force that zings and zaps through the stem of a flower turning it into a neon-lit fuse. Then describe or express it in any way you can.
Clearing the Rubble
from the Pathway to Joy
Yesterday a young woman was talking to me about her boyfriend breaking up with her. She was hurt and sad about the break-up but it seemed to me she was even sadder about how this was going to affect her in the future. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that I am going to start putting up walls.” Up to this point in her life she said, “I have gone into every relationship with a completely open heart – no holds barred; just absolutely open to exploring all the possibilities….” She was not, she thought, going to be able to do that anymore. “That’s what happens, you know,” she said as only a 20-something can say to a seemingly clueless 60-something, “people reach a point where they put up walls. They do it to protect themselves.”
This probably doesn’t seem to be a particularly startling insight to most of us. But what I think was truly insightful about this young woman’s observation was that she was truly and deeply lamenting it. These carefully constructed, impenetrable rock and mortar constructions were going to limit her: close off her openness; curtail her spontaneous joy. As long as these walls existed she would not be able to feel love, to experience it, to be awash in it the way she once had. And even if a time might come when she’d feel safe enough to tear them down, she would find rubble strewn over pathways that once would have been free and easy traveling…
This may be a particularly good time of year to look for any walls – or the debris from ones we’I've tried to tear down – that might be lurking in our psyches. Spring has come late in the North where I live, but whether it is Spring for you or early summer, this is a time to feel exhilarated, to soak up the life energy that is bursting out in bud and bloom all around us. A time to thrill to what Dylan Thomas called up with his famous image of “the green fuse that drives the flower” – that vibrant, vital force that zips and zings just beneath the skin of new-born leaves and grasses.
We all know that erecting walls doesn’t just keep us from feeling hurt; it does to our emotions exactly what chopping off the red from one end of a rainbow and violet from the other would do to our vision. But we might not think about the fact that it also restricts our creative ability. It’s like one of those laws you had to memorize in high school chemistry class: The degree to which you suppress your emotions is inversely proportional to the degree to which you are able to express yourself.
In my workshops I sometimes say, “There’s no art without heart”. Corny as this saying may be, it remains true.
So let us examine ourselves. Ask a hard question: “Do I truly feel with the intensity that I once did?” If the answer is no, be brave, seek out old hidden walls, tear them down, and clear the rubble from the pathways to your heart.
Then take up paintbrush, pen, drum, or dancing shoes and express your Self.