Does Life create Art or does Art create Life?
Can we illustrate what is occuring within the artist/writer before they bring forth a masterpiece, or even what stops them delivering a great work into the world?
I’ve been wrapped in a state of reflection on my own creative process lately.
I’ve been watching what I do, hearing what I say, and what gets in the way of me daring to live by my dreams.
“I’m too busy to do that, I haven’t got time.”
“There’s just so much to do.”
“There’s not enough time left for me at the end of the day.”
Returning to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting The Power Of The Wild Woman has opened the flood gates for me and shown me how the woman whose creative life is damaged/malnourished/neglected will struggle to balance all other areas of her life. Because art feeds the soul (whatever form your own art takes). In making excuses not to do her art, she is cutting herself off from her own true source of power and condemning herself to carry on living a half-life of housework and chores.
I remember recently saying that I had “sneaked” a few moments here and there to paint, or to read, or just to reflect. A little alarm bell rang in my head, and then I found it on page 308:
“A woman must be careful to not allow overresponsibility (or overrespectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”
I know this isn’t going to come as a great revelation to anyone, maybe anyone other than myself. But I’m just starting to learn how to mark out some time and space for myself. I find I need time doing nothing, the ‘rests, riffs and raptures’, in order to just let creativity flow. AND THEN perhaps I can actually write, or paint, or create, if there is still time to bring it about.
Sometimes I wish I’d been born male. Perhaps I’d believe in my indelible right to have time to create, meditate, reflect, generate or just rest in the raptures of life.
Have women truly been liberated? Or are we still raising our daughters to believe they must dedicate all their essential energy to nurturing others, caring and cooking; coaxing our menfolk into positive action?
We lost out when we bought into the notion of the nuclear family and cut ourselves of from the community of other women. How much easier it would be to raise children together, to share the drudge-work together, and then have a quiet women’s space to retreat to together, for painting and singing and drumming and laughing. Or just to sit in solitude with our inner selves.
I see now that it is all our own task to liberate ourselves.
And so, in order to be here today, and pour out these words, I’ve neglected to do all the following things:
- Washing up
- Paying of bills
- Booking a mechanic to service my car
- Make the beds
- Put clothes in washing machine
- Tidy away mess from yesterday
- Call on my mother
- Get my hair cut
Hooray for me!
This is only the start.
