[This is a companion post to “A River Within,” 8/10/20.]
“I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression.”
–Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992)
Detail, Minneapolis painting, 2017, qouache on paper.
In the chapter, “Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life,” writer and Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers the metaphor of a river for the innate creativity that runs through our bodies. This inner river wants to flow freely but can be contaminated, poisoned, overly managed or dammed up. Estés writes that in the quest to live creatively, we must take back the river by intentionally clearing up anything from our history and culture that has polluted or blocked it. Negative psychological complexes and limiting beliefs that are internalized and anything external in the environment causing distortion, from family, friends, and mates to jobs, culture, and religion. She lists the following actions to reclaim the internal creative waters:
“Receive nurturance”: taking in the good when others acknowledge and compliment your work. Not deflecting it away.
“Respond”: being able to respond to everything around you and—among all the possibilities—to choose how to shape it into a unique expression. Not suppressing or limiting choice.
“Be wild”: letting ideas loose into the world, streaming out of the mind and body without censorship. Not controlling, managing or blocking the initial flow.
“Begin”: if you’re scared or unsure, starting, and if you’ve failed, starting again. Not letting fear stop you.
“Protect your time”: establishing clear boundaries around your creating and thinking time. Not letting other demands usurp your time.
“Stay with it”: showing up consistently, learning and growing, committing to the process. Doing the internal work. Not giving up when it is difficult or challenging. Not starving your soul.
“Protect your creative life”: with fangs, if necessary. If your soul is starving, taking care of it, then honoring your creativity every day. Not letting anyone or anything force you into famine.
“Craft your real work”: building warmth, balancing responsibilities that pull you in multiple directions, and insisting on a quality creative life. Not allowing anyone or anything to steal it away.
“Lay out nourishment for the creative life”: stocking up on the four essentials of time, belonging, passion, and sovereignty.
After we refresh the river, the creative waters flow as intended. The river swells and slows in natural rhythms of increase and decrease. Natural contaminates are taken care of within the ecosystem, purifying itself. And we are finally free to drink from its waters without worry or fear.
Once taken back, the river returns to us as a source of nourishment. Calming and healing from within.
Sit by the river. Behold the clear, clear waters. Offer thanks to nature’s resiliency.