Making Space ~ by Karen Richards

It has been six months since we last posted on Dew on the Grass. Life has been busy for all of us, in different ways. The summer seems to be a time for outdoors and family and then there are the general ups and downs of the everyday that draw on everyone’s energy. Still, as autumn begins to wrap us up in her “mists and mellow fruitfulness”, I have a sense of returning home, here to our little blog, and to the words that are waiting patiently to be written.

It has been a revelation to me, in recent years, to realise that the creative parts of our nature are expressions of our spiritual journey. That may surprise the reader who has always known this, or in fact, does not yet know it. I have had an impetus to write since I could first hold a pen and join words together into sentences. In infant school, I was encouraged by my teacher when I wrote short stories and I often got to perform them in front of the class. I attempted to write a novel, when I was nine, sent articles to magazines, which were rejected,  and in my early teens, wrote poems that I showed to no one for fear of judgment.

Like many people, especially women, perhaps, as I emerged from the creative freedom of childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood, crushing self-doubt stoked the belief that writing was a waste of time when I could be doing something more productive and this halted the creative flow, tied me in knots and generally crushed the intuitive knowledge within me that writing my thoughts down on the page was a means of spiritual self-discovery. Furthermore, it took many years to understand that revisiting those words, moulding them like wet clay, and presenting them to a wider audience was not necessarily a pretentious act but one of trust in a process of growth that goes deeper than the words, themselves.

Of course, life is busy and always will be, there are many pulls on our time, but neglecting the creative life within us, whether that be writing, drawing, sculpting, or other form of creativity such as sewing or knitting, if that is our means of expression,  is like shutting off our air.

Artists who write about writing not as a commercial enterprise but as a way of delving deeper into the human heart and consciousness, such as Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, have long advocated for spending time each day simply spilling out onto the page without premeditation of what gets written. The key to this method is to allow the words to arrive on the page, without letting our inner judge impede them. We sit, without expectation, in a space that is simultaneously empty and ripe with the potential for insight. It is a revelation to bring this type of trust to our relationship with creativity, whether it is writing or any other form of art. It lays us bare, all quest for accomplishment is necessarily dropped and we release that which needs to be seen.

This is akin to sitting on our meditation cushion, facing the wall. We have no warning of what thoughts or emotions will arise.  We can do this anywhere and at any time, of course, but, as with any practice, creating an environment that is conducive to the process is helpful. Sometimes, what comes is a need to change something in our lives. Even if the change is small, it can be profound. It is the space that speaks and connects us to our true nature.

One afternoon, quite recently, after carving some time into my day for reflection and writing,  I knew that I had to do something quite specific to support myself emotionally and spiritually. Previous visitors to this blog, and to entries that I have posted, may have picked up on the fact that my husband is chronically ill, and requiring a lot of care. He lives and sleeps on the ground floor of the house, whilst I slept upstairs in an enormous double bed, a relic of a former time in our marriage. The bed filled the room. I struggled to find a bit of wall space to place my meditation bench. The room was cramped and I felt cramped, along with it. It seemed to represent my feelings of being squashed: of being held hostage in a situation that I felt I could not escape from. Of course, being in these ‘no escape’ situations can, of themselves, be a catalyst for spiritual awakening and I did not want to turn away from any part of my situation. At the same time, I felt I needed the air to move and to unblock some energy. I needed to create space in the physical environment to breathe my way back to a regular writing practice.

So, with help, I moved the enormous bed into a spare bedroom and replaced it with a far less grand single bed, which I placed against a wall, found a lovely desk on an online auction site, which now sits, catching the morning sunlight, in the bay window, and, importantly, there is also wall space for my meditation bench. The centre of the room is empty. I may dance in it if the mood takes me!

The late Thích Nhất Hạnh once said that we have a right to meditate. I think we have a right to write, too. Or, sculpt, sew paint or practice whatever connects us to our inner life and spiritual home. To do this makes us richer, more integrated human beings – we just have to show up and let go.

References:

To Autumn by John Keates

Writing Down the Bones  – Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg – Shambala Press

The Artist’s Way – A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self by Julia Cameron – Macmillan Press