Creative acts are not about hanging on to what we believe and know, but come instead from yielding to a new idea, the next movement, the next chapter in life. Awe is what moves us forward, writes Joseph Campbell. The hero journey is inside of every one of us, you tear off the veils and open to the mystery of yourself. You set out to understand who you are, and the words and images that follow become the art you create.
It is the most exhilarating trip, it is right at hand, requires no boat, train or car, it is free. You don’t need a credit card or IRA. Yet so few people choose to make the trip. Claudia Van Gee decided to make the trip this week, it began in Pensacola, Florida. Van Gee wrote on her new blog “Life As I See It” why she wants to overcome her fear and write. It is as good an explanation as I have heard: ” I want to be heard,” she says, ” little old invisible in-a-crowd” me. I want my words to be like footprints left in clay to have someone ponder years in the future who this woman was and how did she live and think and breathe?”
Campbell wrote that God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, “Ahh!” For me, creativity is the willingness to let go of the life I’ve planned, so as to experience the life that awaits me. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can grow.
Claudia Van Gee is on the journey, in a process. She will travel to unknown and sometimes frightening places, she will find exhilaration and strength. She may encounter magical helpers along the way, some of them animals if she is open to seeing them in this way. She seems to be, she writes lovingly of her border collies. She will return changed, for all of her life.
An artist is one who has learned to recognize and share the radiance of all things, one who seeks to tell the truth as best he or she can understand it. There is great joy in this but authenticity can sometimes be thankless and disturbing, it is sometimes rewarding beyond imagination.
Like the rest of us on the path, Claudia will find her studio, her sacred place. It might be a room, an attic, a basement, a barn, the inside of her soul. You must have a sacred space, you must have a room or an hour of the day, a space that is yours. A place where you know no one, no one can reach you, there is no news but the beat of your heart, a space where you owe nothing and are owed nothing. A place where you can simply experience and bring to the world what you are and wish to be, what you feel and see and know.
So that, I think, is the rising of the soul, the life that is not hollow.
Ask Claudia Van Gee. We all wish to be heard, to raise our voice to the world. Little old invisible-in-a-crowd us. We want our words to be like footprints left in clay to have someone ponder far into the future and ask: who was this person and how did she live and think and breathe?”
