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In manifesting our potential as creators and creatrices, we are not so much doing anything important, as we are living out the logical journey of ourselves. We are building what we be. We are experiencing through the filter of who we are. Being who we are is pretty much something important.
Anyone who creates, no matter what medium we use, is tapping into the archetypal alchemist. We are becoming both the changer and the changed, the lead, the gold and the catalyst which transforms. We are stepping into the cauldron which is this skin and tooth and nail, and stepping through with wonderment into the vast potential, the unknown and the fluid. Dip us in the cauldron and we emerge glistening, blind and shining. As we dry into solid form, our hands feel earth to flesh, ocean to blood, and stones to diamonds on our tongues. This creation does not need to do anything. This creation just needs to be.
A lot of people get caught up in their ego, in that "rational" nitpicking inner voice that can find a thousand reasons for "No" against the heart's single, golden "Yes".
Allow me a tangent :
My husband does stick figure art. His drawings have no sense of perspective, no sense of
proportion, no sense of, well, features, details, or any discernible markings that might
help the viewer to tell, say, a pig from a shrub. During a "crayon time" exercise we were doing
at a workshop, he drew a picture of my dream house in the mountains, with our thirteen future
cats, two mohair goats and a llama. What mattered was not the way he drew it, but what he drew,
why, and the place within him that it came from. This picture is my favorite piece of art
in the house. I keep it on the fridge so I can see it every day.
Apparently the llama is hiding inside the house
and the goats are standing side by side on the roof.
Some of the cats seem to be side by side as well.
The point is, who really cares what it looks like. Does the act of creating make you feel good? Then do it! Just roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and have fun. In the end, a macaroni picture is not all that different froma masterpiece, so long as the sentiment is the same.
As artists, (and we are all, in some way, artists) we ourselves become the cauldron, and we invite everyone we encounter to submerge, and then re-emerge, changed. As artists, we embrace the crossroads, the moment when everything and nothing happens at once; the moment after the universe has inhaled. We are Schroedinger's cat, we are the unknown made manifest through another's heart. We are the garden of shadow and bone, the ethereal wound bright to form. We are the loamy earth, the taste of copper and salt, the ashes of the other's phoenix.
There is healing in a stick of wax. There is self-love in parchment and pigment and canvas. I invite you to explore and become. I invite you to cultivate your own personal garden, free of judgement, free of expectations, and just because.
As an offering, I give a glimpse of my own garden, unrefined, unpolished, and existing only for the process which brings me joy and opens my spirit. Here are my macaroni pictures.
I invite you to enter. I invite you to emerge, changed.
