Wild Mercy

When you were a child, you knew yourself to be cocreator of the universe. But little by little you forgot who you were. When you were a child, everything was about color. Now you pick black as your automatic font color, because that is the coin of the realm. When you were a child, you made up songs. You don’t sing much anymore; you lecture, or you yell, or you keep a safe silence. When you were a child, you traveled from place to place by dancing, and now you cultivate stillness, which is great, but you are forgetting how to move to the music of your soul. You can hardly even hear that inner music over the clamor of all your obligations.

Reclaim your wild creativity. I know it’s dangerous. When you allow yourself to become a conduit for Shakti (primordial cosmic energy), she enters like light and everything becomes illuminated. She fits you like a second skin, and you feel everything—pervasive bliss, deep ache. She makes you hungry, fills you up, makes you drowsy, keeps you awake all night. She arouses praise and moves you to lament. She is the sacred taking the ordinary hostage. You cannot resist her.

Of course you are afraid of what might happen if you were to lift the lid off that box. A thousand beautiful things might come tumbling out and take over your life. You could be consumed by the urge to compose a libretto or paint a mural and lose track of your responsibilities. You are smart to be wary of opening the cage to your sleeping artistic impulses. They are likely to come roaring forth like flames and take your orderly life to the ground. Next thing you know you’ll be bursting into song at parent-teacher meetings or doodling all over your tax returns. What if you were to follow the visions that fill your head and heart, begging to be manifest through your hands, and you ended up neglecting your children’s breakfast?

It is not always so risky to make art. You don’t have to dedicate the whole of your life to Shakti’s impulse to create. Beauty blooms in tight spaces. You are not too busy or too poor or too independent to learn to throw earthenware pots or play the drums. When you make time for beauty, the universe miraculously expands to welcome it. You find yourself picking up the guitar you hadn’t tuned since college and noodling around. Suddenly you can play “House of the Rising Sun” again, and it sounds better than ever, seasoned as it is by all those years of unfortunate choices and sweet suffering. Instead of watching the nightly news, you compile all those freewrites you have scribbled in assorted notebooks and in the margins of takeout menus. You type them up and watch them bloom into a poetry garden.

Lo and behold, you still balance the checkbook, hang the laundry, and help your kids with their math assignments (even if you didn’t love math yourself).

Yes, you are worthy of art making. Dispense with the hierarchy in your head that silences your own creative voice by suggesting that you could never be a Picasso or a Puccini and so you might as well not even bother painting or composing. Of course you could never be a master like those masters. They were men, and it is men who set the stage for artistic mastery, just as it is men who built the altars of the world’s religions and then discouraged women from joining them there. It is not only your birthright to create, it is your true nature. The world will be healed when you take up your brush and shake your body and sing your heart out. Shakti, the feminine, the dynamic nature of reality, is dying to take you for a spin.

The Alchemy of Art

A miraculous event unfolds when we throw the lead of our personal story into the transformative flames of creativity. Our hardship is transmuted into something golden. With that gold we heal ourselves and redeem the world. As with any spiritual practice, this creative alchemy requires a leap of faith. When we show up to make art, we need to first get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed through us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. We must be willing to abide in a space of not knowing before we can settle into knowing. Such a space is sacred. It is liminal, and it’s numinous. It is frightening and enlivening. It demands no less than everything, and it gives back tenfold.

There is a vital connection between creativity and mysticism. To engage with the creative impulse is to agree to take a voyage into the heart of the Mystery. Creativity bypasses the discursive mind and delivers us to the source of our being. When we allow ourselves to be a conduit for creative energy, we experience direct apprehension of that energy. We become a channel for grace. To make art is to make love with the sacred. It is a naked encounter, authentic and risky, vulnerable and erotically charged.

The muse rarely behaves the way we would like her to, and yet every artist knows she cannot be controlled. Artistic self-expression necessitates periods of quietude in which it appears that nothing is happening. Like a tree in winter whose roots are doing important work deep inside the dark earth, the creative process needs fallow time. We have to incubate inspiration. We need empty spaces for musing and preparing, experimenting and reflecting. Society does not value its artists, partly because of the apparent lack of productivity that comes with the creative life. This societal emphasis on goods and services is an artifact of the male drive to erect and protect, to engineer and execute, to produce and control. Art begins with receptivity. Every artist, in a way, is feminine, just as every artist is a mystic. And a political creature. Making art can be a subversive act, an act of resistance against the deadening lure of consumption, an act of unbridled peacemaking disguised as a poem or a song or an abstract rendering of an aspen leaf swirling in a stream.

The part of our brains with which we navigate the challenges of the everyday world is uneasy in the unpredictable sphere of art making. We cannot squeeze ourselves through the eye of the needle to reach the land of wild creativity whilst saddled to the frontal cortex, whose job it is to evaluate external circumstances and regulate appropriate behavior. Creativity has a habit of defying good sense. I am not arguing, however, that the intellect has no place in the creative enterprise. The most intelligent people I know are artists and musicians. Their finely tuned minds are always grappling with some creative conundrum, trying to find ways to translate the music they hear in the concert hall of their heads into some intelligible form that others can grasp and appreciate.

What a creative life demands is that we take risks. They may be calculated risks; they may yield entrepreneurial fruits, or they may simply enrich our own lives. Creative risk taking might not turn our life upside down but, rather, might right the drifting ship of our soul. When we make ourselves available for the inflow of Shakti, we accept not only her generative power but also her ability to destroy whatever stands in the way of our full aliveness.

You do not always have to suffer for art. You are not required to sacrifice everything for beauty. The creative life can be quietly gratifying. The thing is to allow ourselves to become a vessel for a work of art to come through and allow that work to guide our hands. Once we do, we are assenting to a sacred adventure. We are saying yes to the transcendent and embodied presence of the holy.

SARASWATI

Picture this: A luminous goddess seated on a white lotus blossom beside a flowing river. In one of her four arms she holds a book—the ancient Vedas, the source of perennial knowledge and symbol of the power of literature to transform consciousness. In another hand she holds a mala, a string of 108 crystal beads, the source of deep concentration and symbol of the power of meditation to generate one-pointed awareness. In another hand she holds a vessel filled with sacred water, the source of purification and symbol of the power of creativity to refine wisdom to its essence. In her fourth hand she holds a vina, a stringed musical instrument, the source of perfection for all the arts, symbol of the power of music to awaken the heart.

She is Saraswati, and she’s my muse. This Hindu goddess is all about the flow of creative energy and clarity of expression. She is passionate and focused, elegant and lucid. She is unadorned, far more interested in the process of creating beauty than in being an object of beauty herself. Sometimes she is accompanied by a swan, symbol of discernment, or a peacock, symbol of grace. She emerged from the mouth of Brahma, the creator, when he wished to create meaning from the formless chaos of nonexistence. This makes Saraswati cocreator of the universe. She is Brahma’s consort, yes, but Brahma is also Sarsawati’s consort. Their love play unfolds in the microcosm of our souls.

I have a small statue of the goddess beside my writing desk to help endow me with creative flow. I also have a host of other inspiring feminine wisdom beings, such as the Pueblo Indian storyteller, a clay figurine of a grandmother with her mouth open and many children in her arms as she tells them the legends of their people. The storyteller figure is a modern expression of the perennial oral tradition, in which we simultaneously safeguard ancestral wisdom and meet it anew in our own times, our own communities, our own bodies.

ONE OF EACH

My friend Azima sees creativity as a sacred stream that flows above our heads. Occasionally we are able to connect to it and bring it down to earth through music or painting, poetry or dance. The forms it takes are exquisitely various, but the source is One.

She should know. Azima wins the contest for practicing the most artistic forms, and engaging them all with great mastery, in service to the One. Born in Bulgaria under the Communist regime, Azima studied piano at the National Academy of Music in Sofia, which opened the way for her to escape oppression, and she continued her studies in Rome, where she also began performing to great acclaim. Swiftly gaining a reputation as a virtuoso pianist, Azima was recognized with multiple awards for her brilliance, including a prize for “virtuosity with distinction” from the Geneva Conservatory of Music. She accepted teaching positions throughout Europe. Eventually she settled in London, married a Scottish clan chief, had two children with him, and directed a chamber music festival for ten years on the Isle of Skye. Azima still lives in London, but she regularly travels the world, riding camels in the Sahara and praying in silence in the Sinai, creating painting diaries in South India and writing her memoirs in New Mexico.

Like the story of every mystic I know, it was only when the seams of Azima’s carefully stitched life began to unravel that the holy mystery infiltrated the fabric and everything turned inside out, leaving her with a soul on fire and an unquenchable urge to create. Following her divorce, Azima continued playing piano but began writing and painting as well. She discovered the work of the great medieval Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi (or, as Azima puts it, Rumi found her). Then she collaborated with a native Persian speaker to translate Rumi’s poetry into a fresh, accessible English that is deeply steeped in the mystical aspects of his teachings. This intimacy with the ecstatic poet led Azima to create a musical group called Lovers of Rumi. They gave concerts all over Europe, weaving short musical movements by Bach, Scriabin, and Brahms (played by Azima) with the poetry of Rumi. Many different people across the religious and cultural spectrum read the poems.

Azima found me after my second book, a translation of Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle, was published in the United Kingdom. She sensed we would resonate with each other and took the risk of reaching out. A holy conversation unfolded, charged with energy, blessing my life with the kind of soul companionship I had rarely experienced. We wrote each other long emails, sharing our broken hearts and our life stories. I was only a couple of years out from the firestorm of my daughter’s death, and my heart still had no skin. I wasn’t interested in anything less than full and authentic connection with other human beings on a path of transformation in love.

Over the years, Azima and I have visited each other’s worlds, sharing music and poetry, food and Sufi practices. In between, we tend the thread of our connection with varying degrees of communication and silence. A watercolor Azima made for me of the opening page of Rumi’s multivolume poem The Masnavi hangs above my writing desk, and her icon of Christ holding up his hand in a mudra of blessing is propped on the bookshelf behind me.

What strikes me most about Azima is how elegantly she embodies that which my own soul knew as a young girl yet had trouble pulling off: each of the creative arts are different languages with which to praise the Divine, and they are all interconnected.

Becoming Beauty

As you may have gathered, I was never at home in the academic world. I did well in college, but only because I worked my ass off, spending most of my stint in exile, well beyond my right-brained comfort zone. Somewhere midway through my graduate studies in philosophy, I had an epiphany. I was not interested in either the logical validity or the utility of ideas; I was drawn to their aesthetic value. When an argument was presented with passion and literary power, my whole body responded, and this visceral resonance constituted agreement. This was nothing to be ashamed of!

“You cannot step in the same river twice” (Heraclitus). “Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent” (Wittgenstein). “God is dead” (Nietzsche). Fine! Most of the material we read and wrote about was generated by DWM (Dead White Men), but my radar skirted their cognitive credentials and honed in on their feminine hearts.

This aesthetic sensibility was partly an artifact of the way I was raised. My dad read math books for pleasure. He swooned in the face of the elegance of certain theorems. As other fathers might quote the Bible, he would also recite from the modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, lines such as “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky. . . .” My mom painted with oils, drew with pastels, sculpted with metals and stone. When we were growing up, she played the guitar and sang folk ballads. Even today, moved by a coyote drinking from her garden fountain or news of a vast network of Mayan city-states discovered in Guatemala, my mom’s response is to compose poetry, short stories, lyrical essays.

My parents did not attend synagogue and never stepped foot in a church, but they bowed at the altar of the arts. They belonged to the cult of Dostoevsky, who proclaimed that beauty would save the world. Yet I also learned from my family that beauty is not limited to that which is pleasing. Art can be jarring or dissonant, offensive or haphazard. It disrupts the dominant paradigm and unloosens the chains of conventionality. This chaotic quality, too, is in the wildly creative nature of Shakti.

My own relationship with beauty has never been one of detached appreciation. It is a direct encounter in which the subject-object distinction becomes irrelevant. Nor is my connection with the beautiful limited to the arts, although it is best evoked through the arts. Stopping for a moment to catch the call of a mourning dove in my driveway transports me. I forget to open my car door and get in and drive to the post office, as planned. All my other senses start to flower. I smell the high desert yearning for snow. The blue sky bends to touch the crown of my head. Time inhales, and I am suspended in that space between breaths. Beauty commands silence and stillness. It invites the momentary dissolution of self-identity. What a relief!

FORM AND FREEDOM

Chiyo-ni was born in eighteenth-century Japan, just after the death of Basho, a master of the incredibly brief form of poetry known as haiku. Haiku is precise. It conforms to an exact syllabic count: the first line has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five. Within that container the poet’s wings expand in all directions, touching the ordinary and rendering it extraordinary. There is freedom in form.

Just as women were not historically permitted to be rabbis or priests, astronomers or philosopher-kings, there are almost no female haiku poets of Chiyo-ni’s time. Yet Chiyo-ni defied convention as a very young girl and began composing poetry at age seven. By the time she was seventeen, her poems were admired all over Japan. While Basho was an important influence on Chiyo-ni, she swiftly developed a voice of her own. Her poetry exudes brisk simplicity and unclouded vision. She observed the ordinary world with such loving attention that it could not resist revealing its hidden treasures.

I came across her most famous poem, “The Morning Glory,” many years ago in D.T. Suzuki’s ecstatic essay about it.

The morning glory!

It has taken the well bucket.

I must ask elsewhere for water.

Here is a woman so available for the encounter with beauty that seeing the delicate flower momentarily arrests her capacity to function, Suzuki tells us. Returning to her senses, rather than dare to disentangle the vine from the bucket, she leaves it undisturbed and goes to a neighbor’s well to complete her chore. In three quiet lines of verse, Chiyo-ni expresses the amplitude of feminine spirituality: finding the sacred in the ordinary and praising it with the fullness of her being.

Chiyo-ni, who insisted on living a life of simplicity and humility, is recognized as one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese literature. She spoke with candor and playfulness about the experience of being a woman. She writes of women planting rice with their hair in disarray, forgoing painted lips for clear spring water, airing out their hearts along with their kimonos.

I have always flourished within certain formal boundaries myself. Growing up as an artistic child in the counterculture, with its emphasis on free expression, I often detected a subtle criticism of my drawings. My impulse toward exactitude was seen as regimented. “Why don’t you color outside the lines once in a while?” my mom would challenge me. When I learned to play the guitar, I kept close to the arpeggios and fingerpicking patterns I practiced between lessons. I studied folk dancing and South Indian classical dance, reveling in precision of movement. When I was sixteen, I moved out of the house I shared with my teacher and his family in Mendocino, and I paid the rent for my one-room cabin in the redwoods by designing specialized logos for business cards. Later, I made my way through college as a scientific illustrator, rendering elaborately shaded fossil bones and decorative potsherds entirely of dots.

I thought there was something wrong with me. I should be more improvisational. I should dance like no one’s watching, strum with a loose wrist, sing scat, layer my canvas with broad brushstrokes and no agenda. But over the years, as with all aspects of my life, I have come to accept my artistic proclivities and embrace them. I am someone who appreciates structure, such as the haiku’s strict five-seven-five syllable count. I compose haiku in my sleep and wake feeling satisfied. I memorize the lyrics to songs in multiple languages and take joy in singing along with the artists who record them. Safely held in the vessel of form, my soul unfurls and ventures into the beautiful wilderness. My adherence to convention does not preclude my wild creativity: it gives it a platform from which to launch.

The way of the feminine is about the movement from formlessness into form, from quietude to expression, a pouring of the waters of the void into the ground of being.

deepening

Create an art piece as an offering to the Divine Feminine. It can be in any form: painting, drawing, sculpture, pottery, sewing, weaving, poetry, prose, theater, dance, music, cooking, gardening—whatever captures your imagination and engages your wild creativity. You may work on it for as long as you need to, but make sure to share it with at least one other person when you’re done.