Stuck in the creative doldrums?
Read Chapter 10 of Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It is not for the faint hearted, as she asserts that to bring back creative life, we have to be willing to ‘wade into the sludge’.
Here are my favourite excerpts from the chapter:
‘Women’s eyes flash as they create, their words lilt, their faces flush with life… They are excited by the idea, aroused by the possibilities, and at that point, like the great river, they are meant to flow outward and continuously on their own unparalleled creative path.’
‘Sometimes there are pressures from her culture that say her creative ideas are useless, that no one will want them, that it is futile for her to continue. That is pollution… lead into the river… killing off both creative impulse and energy.’
‘If we are grasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong…’
‘During a stalled creation, a woman gives the beautiful soul-self “pretend eating”… She throws a little workshop to it here and drops a little reading time for it there. But in the end this has no substance. The woman is kidding no one but herself.’
‘The river has to made clear once again… through the individual’s recognition of the value of one’s unique gifts…’
‘Receive nurturance to begin the cleanup of the river.
Respond.
Be wild.
Begin.
Protect your time.
Stay with it.
Protect your creative life.
Craft your real work.
Lay out nourishment for the creative life.’
‘Be with real people who warm us… Every woman is entitled to an Allelujia chorus… Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.’
‘To lose focus means to lose energy. The absolutely wrong thing to attempt when we’ve lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing it not the thing to do. Sitting and rocking is the thing to do. Patience, peace and rocking renew ideas. Just holding the idea and the patience to rock it are what some women might call a luxury. Wild Woman says it is a necessity.
‘… a woman must rest now… recover her energy. She thinks she cannot, but she can, for the circle of women… always closes to fill in for those who go on rest leave.’
To regain focus, ‘It is important to have a container for all that we sense and hear from the wild nature. For some women it is their journals, where they keep track of every feather that flies by, for others it is in the creative art, they dance it, paint it, make it into a script.’
‘Your worn-out idea or endeavour can shine more brightly if you will take some of it and throw it away… get right down to the seed and to the bones of everything and anything in your life, because that’s where your pleasure is, that’s where your joy is… where there is time to be, wander, write, sing, create and not be afraid.’
Women Who Run with the Wolves
Clarissa Pinkola Estes