Spirituality and the Creative Processes......

Healing 

Creativity, to her, means being who she is, finding words and images for her thoughts and feelings, translating her inner life into outer forms, whether it be through writing a story or a poem. It is the making of her life and her world. She has found that it requires the courage to experiment, to stand against those who are negative toward her ideas, to be sincere to herself in developing her own style of personality and life, realizing that the expressing of her emotions in heartfelt tears when sadness overcomes her is natural and normal and that the raw venting of her emotions is an important step toward freeing herself of painful memories and gut-wrenching hurts. She has also learned that the things that speak to her soul may or may not make sense to all with whom she shares her world. Thus creativity helps her find a way to counter her heaviness and sadness without denying it or even escaping it. She does not want to medically neutralize her depression, but through creativity, she is finding ways to march her footprints through it -  and it is a fine, but crucial line she walks. 

A spiritual outlook for her lightens her dark space - it uses her suffering as a starting point and as the means for seeing things anew, so her creativity can begin in a vision that penetrates her overpowering depression. It is her life moving onward. She can go forward from excatly where she is in her thoughts and feelings to a place where she has never been. She no longer has to constantly manufacture or control her future but can grow the life that is present. She can experience joy again because she can now find something that has life in it. Her soul can be awakened if she is open to letting go.

Words and images have been a very important way for her to describe her life experiences but they must be her own words, her own poetry and her own conclusions. Her language sometimes changes as she gains insight through her writing. Her depth of perception sometimes leads to what she hopes is a beauty of expression. Her poems and stories have, she hopes, become more aesthetically interesting because of a refinement in her thoughts and emotions, as she has found a more honest and direct way of expressing herself through her writing.

Her book is not yet written, but in the meantime, she has continued to tell her story over and over again in the form of short stories and/or poetry, and over time, she will tell it more effectively and join it all together, and in so doing,  connect her to the people with whom she shares her life journey. In the process, she finds unexpected pleasure in the aesthetics of her thoughts and words and that, too, will keep her going deeper, looking for further insights. The beauty of life, to her, is related to the give and take of unconditional love with those with whom she shares her path and that spurs her on to express herself more powefully and this simple art of everyday life continues to play an important healing role in her private world.