What name do we give to our creative work? In the heartland we free-write to altar the words, to see where they will lay, and how they want to be. What name would they be called by, if we were brave enough to stand behind them and allow them to step forward, to claim their space and shape and form?
My creative work has no name. If I were to give it one, I might call it HEALING, because that is what it has done for me, and what I would have it do for others. I might call it COMFORT or CONSOLATION because the page is always there and does not answer back. It merely waits while the sides of me, my interlacing, entangled, unrelenting, disruptive facets argue with each other.
I might call it FRIEND or TEACHER as it guides me to my right path.
My creative work has no name. I would call some of it POETIC or LYRIC, but much of it is merely RANT. I do not wish to call it WRITING: that is too mundane a name. That is the act of doing, not the thing created. I might call it MYSTIC or MYSTERY.
I might call it CARA. ANAM CARA. SOUL FRIEND.
My creative work has no name. I might call it DISCOERY or maybe SEARCH: the seeking and finding of the lost parts of myself. I might call it RECOVERY.
I might even call it NECESSITY.
Healing. Comfort. Consolation. Friend. Teacher. Guide. Lyric. Poetic. Mystic. Mystery. Cara. Soul-friend. Discovery. Search. Recovery. Necessity. All these are the secret names of my creative work.
Or then again…
I might call it FAITH or TRUST – the belief that the opening of myself onto a page might yield a harvest, that something might emerge, something of value and of meaning. I will not call it HOPE…it is stronger than that.
Mostly, in conversation, I simply refer to it as ‘the work’, and I wish I didn’t because it is not work in any sense, not in the sense of being paid for it, nor in the sense of it being a chore.
I might call it PLEASURE. Or PLAY. Or ADVENTURE.
Then again, I might think of it not so much as a thing of joy, but more as a cleansing or clearing, the washing of my tattered emotions, helping them to shine bright again. I might call it PURE.
Perhaps its most secret name is COURAGE – because that is what it takes. And what it gives back.
All of this brings me back to questions I was asked over a recent lunch. One (who would not understand the answer) asked me what is the point of that? about taking a notebook into the rain. Another, more closely attuned, nuanced the question as so what do you get ou t of it? That took some thought, and many ideas emerged, but the word that insisted on being heard loudest and clearest was Fellowship. Some of the people I share writing space with are slowly becoming friends, some I confess do not resonate so well with me, there are those whose energy spikes and sparks against mine, but all are fellow-travellers in loving the planet and trying to put that into words.
There is gathering. Congregation might be an appropriate word.
By being with other writers, I get inspiration and ideas. Conversations open my own ideas that have hesitated to be heard.
Fi said one day that the page and the day are wide open –and so they are – but they are only doorways. We have to have the courage (which means also the vulnerability without which courage does not exist) to step through.
The page, the day, is merely an invitation. I might call it OPPORTUNITY.
It is the opportunity to find out who I am, the opportunity to become more of who I am meant to be. The opportunity to grow, to change, to challenge my own thinking.
It is the opportunity to fully feel the emotions of the moment. Once I accept that invitation there is no going back. The page is silent and yet it rejects lies and half-truths with its blind stare. It dares me to tell the blemished truth unvarnished. Not to bleed all over the page necessarily, not to emote for the sake of doing so, but to acknowledge my inner and outer realities, regardless of how they may look to the rest of the world.
How else can the healing begin? The disfigurement of the leper is not a direct symptom of the disease itself, but the result of not feeling pain. Leprosy kills the ability to feel pain. Without pain we do not know when to withdraw, when to apply the balm. We must feel in order to heal. I might therefore call my work AUTHENTIC. I do not shy away from the hurt until I have understood what it is trying to teach me.
She is gathering many names about her, this creative endeavour of mine. I cannot help but wonder which one she would choose for herself.
I worry that she might still cower in the shadows and call herself UNCERTAIN.
~ / ~
Note: in the firstsentence the word ‘altar’ is used deliberately as spelt, in the sense of
‘laying on the altar’.
