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What are you holding your breath for?
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Sometimes I wish that I was one of those writers who was just constantly dripping with words. Who flings words around like confetti, who just sits down and has torrents of tiny flashing story-telling dragons pour through their hands.
(And for those dragons to use their fiery breath to burn away all the bullshit that this world no longer needs, and to lay eggs which contain delicate and delightful new worlds). Are you still with me? I wish I was one of those writers who has to stop in the middle of the motorway, in the middle of a nappy change, in the middle of open heart surgery just so they can grab a pen and paper and write that gold down. Sometimes I am that kind of writer. I do know what it feels like to be hot-blooded and free. But often, I'm not. I feel unsure of my voice. I worry about crossing boundaries, stepping on toes, getting things wrong, saying too little or too much. I fear sharing truths, that turn out to be partial truths, that then get washed away in landslides the next day. I write screeds of scree that are too wobbly to share. Do you know this feeling? I am on a journey of reclaiming my creative voice, and that journey is long. Something that I explore often with my mentoring clients is how to find our way back to a relationship with creativity that feels enlivening, open-hearted and open-ended. How do we each find our way through stuckness? I know this path intimately, because I am walking it myself. The texture and flavour of our stucknesses (what a sticky word!) is unique to each of us. Sure there are some common causes, such as trauma which lodges us in a fight or flight response, capitalism which tells us that everything we create must have monetary value, and conditioning which tells us that everything we produce must be 'good' and 'pretty' (vomit emoji). And there are endless different strategies to get through, some of them very helpful. But sometimes it feels to me like we are all sitting with our arms crossed and legs folded, holding our breaths, waiting for the same thing -- permission. Permission to play, to take risks, to slip up, to fall, to flail, to want, to make a mess, to go somewhere without knowing where we are going, to be bad at something, to try something edgy, to outrageously succeed. We are waiting for permission to follow an impulse that comes from the inside of us rather than an instruction that is given from the outside. Consider this your permission slip. With love, Rata |
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Some announcements:
Open Floor Community Dance Classes have begun again in Raglan! They are happening every month. Here are the upcoming dates in 2023: Sunday 30th April Sunday 21st May Sunday 18th June Classes happen upstairs at the Raglan Old School Art Centre. Time: 10:30am-12:30pm. If you want to get email reminders about those classes and haven't been getting them already, let me know and I'll put you on that list. Also, I am opening up a couple of 1:1 creative mentoring spots beginning in April. Get in touch if you are interested and I'll send you the details. |
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(c) Rata Gordon 2021-2023