Rootedness

Rethinking  the Creative Process

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again...

to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Rainer Maria Rilke― 


As I talk to each of you, my students and friends across courses, workshops, conversations, I hear so many different voices, different ways of being. Sometimes I hear thoughtful wonderment, at other times I hear grief, confusion and anger. I also hear contentment and joy, worries and fears. But as I talk to each of you, I am thrilled and at the same time quiet, for it is tremendous the energies, insights and questions that you bring to our conversations. Some of you are confident of what you speak, some of you are wandering and yet most of you do not trust your intuition. I wonder what it is about our education system that has created this dissonance within you. Your body and mind are separate and each cannot inform the other except for basic functions. Your head is split into a hundred pieces, fragmented that your thoughts and intuitions cannot meet. And yet amidst all this madness, there lies within you the most beautiful and powerful of insights that can transform you and change the world. In order to relink yourself to your deepest truth, you must learn to trust, fall down and root yourself. Then you will find ways to be immensity and vastness, intensity and lightness and much more. You will find ways to become banyan tree, river, ocean, mountain and endless sky. 

Trust in your creative process by linking it back to the earth. You reside in this tropical belt where life is abundant and rich; watch out for the millions of creativities that are generously surrounding you. How could it be possible that you are struggling when the beautiful aparajita(sangu poo) creeper finds her way across garden, hillside, wall and iron bars!

Let go, trust, find the stillness in your deep inner core and let the creative flow! Make! Let your body, mind and spirit come together with your intelligence. And in this rootedness, find for yourself an alternative creative process! And then like the spider - urnanabha - you spin from within your own core, a zillion different creativities!

Srivi
January 22, 2017