Creativity is Healing
A few weeks back, I showed you my painting, motivated by grief. Since finishing that piece, I could tell there was more to process, and I found myself writing a fairy tale, inspired by my painting. I hadn't written fiction for so long, it felt intimidating, similar to the way I felt before I started the painting.
I procrastinated like a bureaucrat, until I finally set aside a day to give it a try. If you’ve been to any events at a Waldorf School, my style probably feels familiar. As a trained teacher in that system, I learned about the power of myths, fables, and all of the stories a culture accepts and perpetuates. Tales directed to children may seem light-hearted, but can carry the archetypes and deeply ingrained roles we are drawn to fulfill, perhaps unconsciously.
The yogi’s word for these habits we repeat is Samskaras. You may remember this notion of the well-worn tracks into which we easily fall, whether they serve us or not.
Enrobed in the child-like artwork and romanticized setting of the royal court, this kind of tale can easily draw you in.
Queen Ranunculus is round and juicy in every way, and enjoying her time of freedom from the oppressively artificial culture in which she has spent her life so far. She is swept away by the sensuous spell of plums, and in her bliss, she accidentally ingests the lush landscape of all her unexpressed feelings.
The beauty of writing is that anything can happen! I always enjoy magical realism woven into literature, like that of Isabel Allende, because it actually expresses real life, the way we feel it. At times we do feel like we’re flying, or being roasted by a dragon’s firey breath, or utterly lost and alone, in the desert landscape of another planet.
In this tale, the a plum pit contains the suppressed emotions of the entire culture. This is immediately recognized by the magistrate, and he tries to remove this dangerous object eternally.
If you’ve been paying attention, you recognize the ways beauty and freedom are squashed and shamed, mostly for the pretense of some order. Writing about these ideas outside the arena of an enraged, feminist, 80’s grad school student is a delight. The spell of the story actually swept me into a flow-state-kind-of-trance, and I sat for an entire day with my colored pencils, scribbling away.
Creating art uses the right brain, and this “other half” of our mind, is a less limited influencer of the literary left brain. Together they are like an ideal couple: one moving forward and remembering to shore up the boat, the other sighing in wonder at the movement of the waves, the taste of salt in the air, the beauty of the sunset. Either one, on its own, would suffer.
So Dahlia arrives to infuse the rigid culture with the emotional freedom it has forgotten. But this doesn’t go over so well with those who stiffly insist on preserving the ways in which it’s always been done.
We see the lonely landing place for the ruby red stone, and feel its desolation. Before there’s time to recognize and acknowledge this emotion, we’re swept brusquely back into the status quo. We see and feel the pain of false smiles, the roles we’ve all had to accept, in order to survive. Entire lives have been lived within such constraints.
It is not until this accidental swallowing of the plum’s magical stone, that the circumstances seem to say, “It’s time for a change.”. What is our culture ready for now? Just look around you.
This writing and drawing have been an uplifting release for me, as I continue to navigate this amazing life.
I was inspired by Rob Breszney’s words this week:
“The fact is, the nature of perfection is always mutating. What constitutes enlightenment today will always be different tomorrow. ..
Rather, it remains a mercurial knack that must be continually re-earned.
If you want to befriend the Divine Wow, you must not only be willing to change ceaselessly—you have to love to change ceaselessly.”
I invite you to chew Rob’s assertion, and on this opening to the tale, for a week. I will bring another installment in seven days’ time. Notice what juicy qualities feel like they’re missing from your life. Would you like to suckle a peach or bury your hands in warm beach sand? Maybe you want to experiment with a new way of kissing? Perhaps you haven’t rolled down a grassy hill for decades.
Take time to feel what you body is longing to experience. Maybe you’ll even make a little scribble of this feeling as you contemplate the ways to liberate your own, forgotten jewels.