threads of the spiderwoman: More on "Flow" - the Multiplicity of Creative People

“If there is one word that makes creative people different from others,

it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"

I wrote recently about "inviting flow" as I gave myself the gift of the month of June to go into the clay studio and work without constraints or even ideas about what that work might be. I've not been disappointed in the process, which continues, because ceramics takes patience, and each piece, as its developing, always seems to mention another piece as a kind of "P.S. This Too" afterthought. I guess that is to me true happiness....because it removes you from the mundane time stream and puts you into the creative stream, which is perhaps not apart from timeless.

Somewhere in the course of the flow-stream I ran across these interesting videos and articles about the "multi-dimensionality" of creativity, something that has always been obvious to me (except when I was judging myself as having a bad, life-long case of ADD - I actually was tested once, and it was determined that I was off the charts). But since that time I've come to accept the multiplicity of my interests and ways of self expression as just being about the diversity of my creativity, the diversity of my being. Which I have noticed I share with many, many others. Ultimately, bringing together phrases and means from different internal languages (or disciplines) to say what I have to say, just in different ways. The song has different voices, and perhaps the greatest experience is when the Song sings you. Those are the best of all creative times.

"I, the Song, I walk here."

..........Lakota poem

Anyway, I believe this multiplicity of expression is true of most, if not all, people who are able to contact and unleash their creativity. I've never liked the popular idea that "creative people" are somehow so rare and different (and perhaps suspect as well). They are rare and different only because the inherant creativity, the life force itself, has not been been so discouraged, pounded out of, negated, humiliated, dis-empowered, exhausted, compromised, co-opted, stolen..........away. Or denied. I guess, in essence, I believe the nature of divinity, by any name, is creativity and co-creativity. This is the basis of the metaphor of the Pueblo Spider Woman, Tse Che Nako, also called Thought Woman. Like the spider, the Creatrix weaves the world into being with her own substance, the stories and words and songs she makes about the world, and this is the gift she endows all Her Relations with as well, to "create the world with the stories that are told". At the center of the Great Web, Grandmother Spider Woman is connected to all things, all beings, all stories.

"If you bring forth that which is within you it will save you.

If you do not bring forth that which is within you, it will destroy you."

...........the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

I have no doubts about how privileged I am, always have been, to be free to create and explore. And that privilege began with education and parents that encouraged me. It is always sad to me when I encounter so very many people who denigate their own creativity and imagining powers. Anyway, interesting articles...........

“Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me,

how I perceive things, they are my way of communicating.”

Viggo Mortensen, Actor, Artist, Writer, Activist