Creativity is child's play. When you're an adult, though, it's sometimes hard to get back to those spaces that you took to without thinking as a child.
Thinking - that's the problem.
I don't write books. Or at least I haven't so far in my life. But I think this quote above is true no matter what you're writing.
The quest is to make as much space as you possibly can to allow that first draft to slide out. I struggled so much more with this in earlier years. I still do, quite often, but I've learnt a few tricks so that I feel more comfortable making space for that uncomfortable, messy process.
About a decade ago I was totally fed up with trying to write and feeling stymied even before I began by this shitty gatekeeper standing guard, spouting shit but scaring me with intimidation, saying, "What are you writing here? You don't even know what you're writing. This is dumb. What's this about? This is a waste of time."
How the fricken hell would I know what it's about when I haven't even written it yet? I began doing art therapy to see if it might help me. Exploring this gatekeeper and why the hell he was so insistent on nagging me so that I put down the pen or left the keyboard in frustration, while somewhere inside me I felt stories wanting to come out."
I can't recommend art therapy enough. It was such a help for me and I return often to thoughts about what I learnt in those sessions with just me and my art therapist. I would paint pictures, or draw with crayons, or sculpt with clay. The focus wasn't on how good a piece of art I could produce. It wasn't about making art at all, really. It was about using the art process to learn what i was trying to tell myself. To find the helper. To undo the knots of that critical gatekeeper, to unravel him like wool a little. To learn to not be terrified by his dooming and to firmly set him aside.
This is Blob. Blob is damn ugly. He is my gatekeeper. His intentions are good - he tries to protect me from the scariness that is confronting my own subconscious to write. Creating is scary in this way. And so I sculpted him, brought him out of the dark from where he hid and criticised and into the light.
This photo was before I hollowed him out in preparation to be fired in the kiln. While I was carving him out, my hand slipped. Or did it "slip"? I didn't consciously intend to slip. And yet what happened was I slipped and carved a big hole in his throat.
I was going to repair it. But it was so wonderful the way it was, cutting out his voicebox accidentally, telling him to shut the hell up, showing him who's in charge, that I left Blob just like he was, like a cancer patient with a hole in his throat from all that shit he'd been spouting at me over the years.
Learning how to move the critic aside is quite a scary process. But I feel proud of that hard work and about how it feels when, these days, my health allows and the moon is in Uranus and the time is right and the first draft of something comes out, and I let it. Even though the editor part of me finds it excruciating how loose and floppy it is. How much will need to be changed.
But that's okay. That's waaaaaay in the future. Right at this first draft point, I'm rustling up the material. I'm pulling it through from wherever it's been, like pulling multicolour silk magician ribbon through from thin air to here. It does feel like magic. And it does feel like child's play. Even though it's very natural for people like us, and in an earth like this.
Love that you left the hole in his throat!
I've been working much of this year with a dream I had of removing an asbestos necklace I was wearing around my neck. One in which I was allowing my own voice to be poisoned. Definitely not easy to get around those gate-keepers, but we can.
Oh wow, an asbestos necklace. Our dream language always amazes me. It's so poetic. So often when I'm first trying to understand a dream something will seem totally bizarre until I think about it and sit with it and look at it from different angles. And then suddenly it makes total sense and it's so simple in the end. But an asbestos necklace is a very powerful dream. Did it make sense to you straightaway or did you need to sort of translate it to the topside world? :)
I love these symbols that come to ourselves from ourselves that are about healing and greater self-expression. It feels pretty special to be encouraged in this way from a deeper part of yourself.
Didn't all come at once and continues to evolve. I actually had the dream while at a dream workshop and was able to share it with the group and drew a picture of what it looked like in the dream and then burned it in a fire ceremony.
It had a lot of little, plastic pink flowers on it and I was getting it from a 5 and dime with someone I don't particularly like in waking time. There was a lot surrounding all, but basically, a big message to not willingly wear the necklace(s) others might want me to--that submerging myself believing that I was being nice or good or rising above, was really a submerging of parts of myself and that continuing to do this would actually eventually kill me.
Yes, dreams are pretty special and I do attempt to honor and listen to mine.