“The creative life ... is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create.”
–Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992)
Detail, Minneapolis painting, 2017, guoache on paper.
Defining creativity as an overflow of love, a river within that naturally wants to fill the forms and spaces we create for it, writer and Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés likens creativity to a natural force that moves in and through our bodies.
Estés describes the way these internal waters feed everything they touch downstream so that creative acts are not solitary but communal. Creativity nourishes the individual and the whole. Abundant, generous.
This inner creative river, which Estés calls a being in its own right, in turn grows us into life-givers:
"As we create, this wild and mysterious being is creating us in return, filling us with love. We are evoked in the way creatures are evoked by sun and water. We are made so alive that we in turn give life out: we burst, we bloom, we divide and multiply, we impregnate, incubate, impart, give forth."
Estés also points out that this creative river can be poisoned, diverted, misused, and dammed up. Yet ideally its nature is to run clear and freely.
The take-away: Nourish your inner river, remove the barriers, and let the waters run clear and free.
Be a life-giver, and bloom.