Divine Creativity

I write to hear my voice, because there are places of honesty and beauty that I go in my writing that I can't always go in my life, and I must. When I write, I let the parts of me that hold my breath, breathe. I write to let light into my being and let darkness out, to own myself, capturing the rythms of my cycles: journeys into the abyss, travels through glory. I write to allow myself to feel, climb inside my emotions and explore their reaches and textures, summon my tears, let them wash me hot and clean then drain me empty and free. I write myself alive and reborn, whole and holy, to experience myself transformed. I write because I hurt and because I love, and so I won't lose anything. And because I am lonely, sensual and spiritual, and I need to make contact with the divine, and writing for me is like touching: it is rubbing and rolling my body against the divine until my boundaries dissolve and I no longer know where I start and where I stop: I become part of the universal hum. I write to make myself eternal, leave a piece of me stained into the ethers. I write because I believe Goddess listens for the placs where we love and own ourselves. I write to keep myself company, keep myself honest, keep from watching TV. I write to keep my Muse intrigued. I write because I can't draw.

~Meredith Heller, 2003

Okay, so I didn't write that, but I wish I had, because it describes perfectly why I write, how I feel when I write. When I found this passage, (in my We'Moon Datebook, no less) I felt such a profound sense of understanding and community: other people out there feel this. Other people feel the divinity in writing. Other people become entranced, other people feel the physical surroundings melt away, the boundaries of the mind and self blow away. I guess I'm not so insane after all.

There is a kind of divinity in art, whether it be writing, photography, painting, dancing...there is something about art that lets our inner wild go. I pick up the pencil or lay my hands on the keyboard, and the world melts away, leaving nothing but words and a sense of not being individual, but being part of a wonderful, divine, collective whole--a beautiful tapestry, with everything in the universe woven in. It's not just for writing, either. Now, I know I'm not exactly what you would call a good dancer...anyone who saw me "dancing" at Concert on the Lawn last weekend know that for a fact!

But Great Mother, when that music begins, and the beat goes through my body, and the meaning and mood of the music washes over--it's as if something else takes over, something entirely me, and yet entirely foreign. It's the wild woman within, the la loba of every woman's soul, the wildness that is jumping around inside each of us, screaming and snarling to get out. But it's not a bad wildness--it's not an insane, negative wildness. It's a violent, passionate, creativity that has long since been repressed since we began being taught that imagination is bad, that we "must conform." It's that Wolf Woman (or Wolf Man, of course) that tears out when confronted with art--with the chance to be free of conformity and repetition! Anyone who has been so consumed with their art, be it music or dance or writing or painting or whatever---anyone who has been so consumed in their art that the world passes by and they don't notice anything but the universe they are creating at the tips of their fingers know what I mean. You know how your self seeps away and blends and molds with the universe around you--you know how the world is no longer so black and white when colors bleed into one another. There is divinity there. There is Sacredness. There is Beauty. There is Chaos, the kind of Chaos that births miniature miracles.

Go. Consume yourself with the divinity of art. Kiss your creator, whoever you view it as. Roll yourself in its essence. Give birth to some miracles. Unleash your la loba.