The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology, this living thing is an autonomous complex.
– C.G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” C.W. 15, par. 115.
Each of us has a yearning, a hunger, to make something of ourselves. This statement implies a making and a shaping of a life into some coherent form. Such making is the original sense of the word poiesis. A formative principle in the soul is awakened when we create analogies of ourselves in whatever form they may take and, perhaps, in different formats as we age. In creating we become witnesses to our own power, our inner authority that allows us to live each day more deeply and more mindfully.
Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard discovered that “creativity is a response to a call of nature and psyche to the wilderness within and without” and that such a response is also related to our spiritual growth (The Call to Create: Celebrating Acts of Imagination). Her insight reveals how mythically inflected is our yearning to leave a trace, to be part of a larger community, and to live a life of mindfulness, which is to be intimate with and guided by our own incarnational reality.
In our four classes together, we will integrate stories, theory (not a lot!), and experiential writing with the intention of gaining a fuller awareness of our creative self, which may have gone into hiding or perhaps is clamoring at the door of our heart and soul, insisting on being heard, if not submitted to. Our topic is both broad and deep; here are four ways we can enter this landscape:
Class One: Creativity: Its Essential Principles and the Spirituality That Guides Us
The focus here will be on two texts on inspiration: Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit by Deborah Anne Quibell, PhD, Jennifer Leigh Selig, PhD, and Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD. Published in 1999, it was awarded first place in a Nautilus Book Award in 2020, under the category of “Creativity and Inspiration.” We will look at the creative inception of the book and at stories that will encourage your creative self. The other is A Pilgrimage Beyond Belief: Spiritual Journeys Through Christian and Buddhist Monasteries of the American West, which surveys my pilgrimage of faith, as well as the nutrients that fed my creative hunger, which will surely relate to parts of your stories.
Class Two: Wounding and Healing: The Place of Embodied Suffering and Creative Healing
This presentation will relate my own upbringing in a violent alcoholic household, which in retrospect was the impetus for my life’s work. I want to call it “suffering into one’s destiny,” and it will, I am certain, touch on your own woundedness as a source of creative power. Our wounds can lead us to wonder and to be curious on a deep level; wounds can be one of the most important ingredients for cultivating a creative life. In addition, the energy that gathers around our suffering of loss, of fragmentation, and of disabilities is often the seedling that finds the soil in which to prosper.
Class Three: Creating a Life of Coherence: Moses and the Burning Bush of Poetic Inspiration
I find in the rich story of Moses a moment of creative insight. While tending his flocks, he comes upon a burning bush just off his routine path in life; it serves as a delicious metaphor for discovering our life purpose while we might have been busy tending to a flock of incoherence. The poet Rumi tells us in verse, “Moses, the inner light of revelation/lit up the top of Sinai, but the mountain/could not hold that light” (Delicious Laughter, 1990, p. 44). We will explore Moses’ fear, his imperfect speech, and his reticence to step off the familiar path; within these human responses, he discovers, with God’s guidance, his true calling.
Class Four: Creative Aging: Recognizing the Wisdom of Becoming Older.
Aging is a time for deepening, and our mortality a time for musing, for remembering, and for recognizing the large patterns that have guided us to the moment in which we are now in our life. It is also a time to reflect on what we do to nourish this precious, tender place in us where we open ourselves and risk our vulnerability in order to gain access to dimensions of life that we may have previously ignored but now want to return to in order to reevaluate our past in light of the present. Being grateful can open us to presences that insist on some attention and to seeing where freedoms that we had not noticed are budding in the garden of our lives. We will explore the direct and intimate connection between mindfulness, gratefulness, and createfulness.
Preparation: Be sure to have a journal or a notebook close by; each class is both conversational and experiential as we call up parts of our own unique narrative and note where creative impulses, attitudes, and desires have nourished us, given the four areas outlined above. We will use 10- to 15-minute writings that will allow us to create and express meaning from our plotline. My hope is that we can share some of these insights with others to assist them on their unique pilgrimage.