wild wideawakeness and radical creativity

282

Here are some classic strategies for ‘unblocking creativity’:

receive nurturance
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*

I used to hold hope in such strategies. It was great fun exploring them as I busily built a creative self. But now it’s different. I found out that there’s a screamingly simple way to open the door to creativity.

The two obstacles to creativity are thinking one knows what it is, and wanting it. Wanting to ‘be creative’ is the safest strategy I know to ensure you will never be creative. Just like wanting to be wideawake will ensure dreaminess.

Wild wideawakeness and creativity both lie beyond the reach of belief and believer.

My strategy is too simple to sell. It wouldn’t fill a ‘how-to’ book:

I simply stop, I sit down, and I shut up.

Great silence never fails to reset its own natural state:  radical creativity.

~

*From Clarissa Pinkola Estes wonderful book, Women who Run with the Wolves

4 thoughts on “wild wideawakeness and radical creativity”

  1. oh just love this Dear One ~ (a letter will indeed find its way to you ~ i trust this) ~ sort of like giving away all our relationship books 😉 that’s what i did 😉

    “Great Silence never fails to re-set its own natural state …..” perfect ~

    thank you ~

  3. ‘Creativity’… ‘being creative’… repeated ad nauseam everywhere – in books, magazines and self-help pamplets. A North-American child rearing and pedagogical obsession. No interference, please!

    “Be creative!” “Children are creative by nature… just let them…”

    I knew there was something wrong with it all – if only because of the insistence and the self-assurance with which it was repeated. Like with the word ‘democracy’. Who would disagree? It became a veritable nostrum.

    Well, it is right (children are creative), but it is “wrong”; among other things, because there is no freedom, real creativity, without discipline… TO STAR WITH. There can be no e-ducation without guidance, as there is no *true* rest without previous *hard* work.

    It was too easy, too optimistic (and too permissive); too much psychologizing, in the absence of wisdom. The wisdom of previous generations now gone, supplanted rather by the ‘educators’ and the professional psychologists (the experts). Adults, not just the children, were left in diapers… psychological and educationally speaking – because they were following the experts. Sorry for this long comment (one has suffered… ).

    1. Yes dear AM the word has lost its currency totally. I so agree with you – in fact you’re on one of my favorite hobbyhorses!

      I was cheered to read an article in The Australian newspaper recently about the principal of Brisbane Girls’Grammar School headed “Creativity a lesson you can’t teach.” Brilliant stuff.

      This might interest you:
      http://www.theawakenedeye.com/on_creativity.htm

      Thank you for your heart-full comment. (I know what that suffering is too …)

      ~ love, ml

Comments are closed.