Tag Archives: Creativity/Spirituality

April 2010 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , ,

Childhood Clover

Thomas Moore, in his book, Dark Nights of the Soul, encourages readers to practice a play activity from their childhood as a way to reconnect with their creativity. The suggestion intrigued and delighted me. What would I play?

Last night I strolled by a patch of blooming clovers and found my child self sitting crossed-legged among them, plucking stem after stem from the moist soil. With my thumbnail, I cut a tiny slit in a stem, and threaded a second stem through it until the blossom caught. I made an incision in the second stem, and in the third, and . . . until I held a ring of clover blossoms wide enough to reach around my neck. Sometimes I added bracelets, too, and emerged from the clover bedecked like a woodland princess. I was magic in my clover necklace: magic and majesty.

So this month I will find myself a field of clover blossoms where I’ll sit cross-legged and craft clover necklaces: one for me and one for each of my daughters. And I will be all the ages I have been since I first made a tiny slit in a clover stalk and threaded another through it.

How might you play? We’d love to hear about your experience! Share your thoughts with us.

October Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , ,

I read and hear a great deal about keeping up spiritual practice in our hectic lives. These past few months, however, another question has intrigued me: what spiritual practices help us wait? Waiting requires intense endurance, especially in a society addicted to busyness. Do any of the following “waiting places” resonate with your experience?

Having emailed countless job applications, you now sit at the computer, awaiting a response from some potential employer somewhere. Having stamped and mailed your “reach school” application, you visit the mailbox each day to discover whether or not they find you worthy. Your medical tests sit in a lab somewhere while you wonder whether or not you can bear what they may disclose. You are mending from an illness or injury; you wonder when life will get back to “normal.” You took a risk in a relationship and now wait, wondering how—or if—the other person will respond.

Waiting season have a timeless quality to them: we itch to DO SOMETHING when the something we are called to do is well . . . wait. Waiting is a marathon we do not run; waiting is an endurance marathon.

I hope some of the practices will supply stamina power for your waiting season.

  • Go deep. Waiting provides us space for reflection. Consider the following books as reflection aids: The Artists Way and The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Edward and Tarcher.
  • Play. If you have ever wanted to mess around with clay or write a limerick or take a walk to nowhere in particular, now is the time!
  • Serve. Waiting can leave us feeling powerless. Yet we always have the power to do the world good. Write someone a letter of encouragement . . . look the cashier in the eye and say “thanks” . . . bake a loaf of bread and give it away.
  • Find a metaphor. It helps me to imagine waiting as the transition phase of birth labor. Because I am in transition, I feel nothing but pain, yet I know that labor ends in birth. Imaging waiting as transition helps me hope—and hope helps me endure.

September Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , ,

A taste of autumn is in the air—it’s a great time to be outside! What transitions do you experience as you walk outside? Evenings racing up on afternoons earlier every day? School buses replacing tour buses? Apples replacing watermelon? Working up to a sweat instead of starting out with one?

September’s Soul & Solace invites you to express a transition in creation through poetry: NO NOT FEAR—YOU CAN DO THIS! Choose a transition that intrigues you or start with one of the suggestions above. If you can, go out and sit with the transition and allow it to bless you. Then create a diamante poem (from If You’re Trying the Teach Kids How to Write, You’ve Gotta Have This Book! By Marjorie Frank).

Line 1: Name the initial experience (for instance, tour bus)

Line 2: Name two adjectives that describe the experience (sleek, sparkling)

Line 3: Name three participles (-ing verbs) that describe the experience (blaring, racing, soaring)

Line 4: Name two nouns for the first experience (travel, highways) and two that describe the experience it transitions into (travel, byways)

Line 5: Name three participles (-ing verbs) that describe the second experience (yelling, waving, yielding)

Line 6: Name two adjectives that describe the second experience (homey, yellow)

Line 7: Name the transition experience (school bus)

You now have a gem of a poem!

tour bus

sleek, sparkling

blaring, racing, soaring

travel highways travel byways

yelling, waving, yielding

homey, yellow

school bus

You can even play with words the can serve as two parts of speech, as with “travel” in this poem: it is written as a noun, and can also be read as a verb.