“While the hero journeys for external fame, fortune, and power, the heroine tries to regain her lost creative spirit.”
Valerie Frankel, From Girl to Goddess
This quote has rocked my world. It feels very, very important.
Frankly, I started Savor & Serve because I was exhausted by the “creativity for creativity sake” message I saw in so many books, blogs and retreats. It seemed so self-indulgent. The world is burning, people, we need to do something!
I still believe we need to do something – doh – but I now know – KNOW in capital letters – that the only way to do something is to regularly imbibe, inhabit and bathe in creative joy.
As Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. says,
“When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.”
The soul needs creative joy so it can serve.
But here’s the rub, the key, the most important part my friends: if you go to creative joy with any agenda, even one as noble as recharging yourself to serve, creative joy hides. It goes underground. Does not come out to play.
Creative joy is pure. It is a state you invite for its own self, not for what it might get you – which might be everything and which might be… nothing.
It may recharge you. It may give you ideas for projects and solutions. It may make you feel more alive. Or it may leave you feeling frustrated and crabby, lonely and thwarted. You can’t know ahead of time, you can’t insist, you can’t force it.
You can create conditions that help creative joy thrive but after that, it’s a wide open mystery.
All my life I have worshipped at the altar of creative joy – and often, as an adult, I have excommunicated myself from that worship because I had “work to do” or even more deadly “creative work to do.”
No more. Making time for creative joy is holy work and part of how we will reclaim the world.
