Creativity | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Writing with the Wind of the Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit in your Wings

Wild Geese fly in a V formation. The lead goose reduces the wind resistance; the others glide, almost effortlessly, in the currents she has created.

During a storm, the eagle waits perched on the edge of its nest for the wind to gain sufficient velocity. Once she knows the direction in which the wind is roaring, she spreads her wings wide, and effortlessly glides into the winds of the storm.

Have you ever seen hawks or eagles soar, wings outstretched, rising without a single beat of their magnificent wings, soaring, soaring? They are soaring on thermal currents—masses of air that rise when the ground rapidly warms up. Or sometimes, obstruction currents, when wind currents are deflected by mountains, cliffs or tall buildings. The resulting updraft lifts them to high altitudes at which they glide.

* * *

The Wild Goose was an emblem of the Holy Spirit in Celtic tradition.

And the eagle, in Scripture, is a symbol both of God, and God’s people.

Eagles never waste their energy flapping their enormous wings—they wait for, and then use thermal currents and obstruction currents to soar on the wings of the wind…

Flying is so much easier when we sense the direction the wind of the Holy Spirit is blowing in our lives, and in the world, and then open our wings and fly in that direction, using the energy he generates within us, and in circumstances around us.

* * *

I have been reading about “the anointing,” in R. T. Kendall’s splendid, “The Anointing.”

He writes: “The anointing is when our gift functions easily. It comes with ease. It seems natural. No working it up is needed. If one has to work it up, one has probably gone outside one’s anointing. If one goes outside one’s anointing, the result is often fatigue, that is weariness or spiritual lethargy that has been described as ‘dying inside.’”

* * *

I find that with my writing on my blog, and indeed all writing. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate, A. W. Tozer wrote. If I listen to what the Spirit is saying to me through the events of my life, record the mini-revelations or epiphanies given to me each day by the God who speaks continuously and is never silent, then blogging is quick, easy and delightful. And what’s more, it often speaks to people.

It’s when I write to grow my blog, wonder if I should write the topical posts that everyone else is writing, be strategic, capture the zeitgeist– that blogging feels heavy, a chore, work rather than play. Why? Because the wind of the Spirit is not helping me soar; I have to expend scarce energy with a mighty, exhausting flapping of wings.

There is a lightness to God’s work, an amused creativity—we get the impression He tossed off zebras, giraffes, toucans, morpho butterflies and orchids in a massive outburst of creativity. God was at play as these beautiful things came into being, step by step through the mighty forces of evolution. His work was deep play.

* * *

In his book, Homo Ludens, or Man the Player, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga, suggests that culture stems from humans at play, humans playing with words, or music or paint or the sketches of mighty cathedrals.

And when I record the whispers of the spirit, write in the updraft of the wild goose of the Holy Spirit, blogging is easy, light and delightful. It has a bit of the playfulness with which I imagine God made the world. I am playing in the fields of the Lord, playing with God, thinking aloud, probably making all sorts of mistakes–but there is a fun and lightness to it all.

I Said to the Man who Stood at the Gate of the Year

By Anita Mathias

Image credit

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

And he replied,

‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’

* * *

King George VI ended his famous 1939 Christmas message with these words. (Listen here.)

They were written by an unknown poet called Minnie Haskell. She wasn’t credited.

“I read the quotation in a summary of the speech,” she told The Daily Telegraph the following day. “I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”

Minnie Haskell published 3 books, none of which were successful. Sadly, even the rest of this poem was not particularly good.

* * *

A lifetime of writing, and you are remembered for 4 lines.

Success or failure?

* * *

If you are a writer or an artist and say, “failure,” well, you are in trouble.

Because there is something mysterious about art.

Art is the spark

From stoniest flint

That sings

In the dark and cold, I’m light.

The craft can be learned by study and practice, but the spark in art which speaks to other people–that is a gift from God. It cannot be learned or simulated.

And we, ultimately, cannot control whether our work has that spark that will live longer than we do.

All we can do is tell the truth, as beautifully as we can.

* * *

And that is why these four lines, which are all that Minnie Haskell is remembered for, are apt as we enter a new year we cannot control.

‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’

In Which We Do not Hear the Cheers of our Invisible Audience

By Anita Mathias

Image by Lize Rixt via stock.xchng

When Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was first performed at the Theater am Karntnertor in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven conducting for tempo, had his back turned to the audience.

There was a standing ovation, the audience tossed their hats into the air; the applause was thunderous, and the aging exhausted composer knew nothing of it.

When the contralto, Caroline Unger, gently turned him around, he saw the ecstatic audience, on their feet, applauding.

* * *

Mr Holland’s Opus tells the story of an American aspiring composer, who marries too young (an accidental pregnancy), and then teaches music at high school for 31 years, all the while longing to complete his opus, his Great American Symphony.

At his forced retirement after music department budget cuts, the students play the glorious symphony on which he had laboured for all those decades. And as he stands, entranced at the music he had never yet heard, and overwhelmed with emotion, they tell him that they, in fact, are his Opus. The lives he poured love and music into were his Opus.

* * *

A writer sows into her little patch of earth, and she does not know who, or how many, her words touch, or how.

We sow, we sow, in our little patch of earth, and we hope our words do some good in the world, touch and change other lives, even a little.

We send our words out into the world, to our invisible audience.

And it’s more than an earthly one.

It is, perhaps, at the end of the performance, at the end of our earthly lives, that God will turn us around and show us how the seeds we have planted have bloomed.

* * *

Always the invisible audience.

The other day, a member of our family got upset with another one, who, though upset too, remained silent, until the angst burned out.

And I said gently, “You thought your self-restraint passed unnoticed. But I am sure Someone was very proud of you, and said to the closest bystander, “Do you see my servant? Did you note the overwhelming temptation to yell back and sin? Did you note the self-restraint?”

* * *

While we live our lives, intensely absorbed in the tempo, we sometimes miss the music our work creates, the reverberations through other people’s lives.

However, when we turn around and see with eternal eyes, we will see our invisible audience, Christ Jesus himself; and the angels among whom there is joy when we repent; joy when we win the little victories no one else notices; joy at what Wordsworth called, “the best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless, unremembered deeds of kindness and of love.”

Thank you Kelly Belmonte at , All Nine Muses for hosting me.

Ideas as Cats and Other Mysteries of Creativity

By Anita Mathias

I think of creativity as God’s river or waterfall into which I step. There is a torrent of ideas out there; I just need to slow down, and step into the deluge.

Ray Bradbury, however, in his wonderful book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, refers to ideas as cats.

“I am accustomed to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter,” writing a short story, “and in an hour, I’ve created a world. I don’t have to wait for anyone. I don’t have to criticize anyone. It’s done. All I need is an hour, and I’m ahead of everyone. The rest of the day I can goof off. I’ve already done a thousand words this morning, so if I want to have a two or three-hour lunch, I can have it, because I’ve already beat everyone.

I never put up with anything from my ideas. As soon as things get difficult, I walk away.

That’s the great secret of creativity.

You treat ideas like cats; you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won’t let you do it. You’ve got to say, “Well, to hell with you.”

And the cat says, “Wait a minute. He’s not behaving the way most humans do.” Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: “What’s the matter with you that you don’t love me?”

Well, that’s what an idea is. See? You just say, “Well, hell, I don’t need depression. I don’t need worry. I don’t need to push. The ideas will follow me. When they’re off-guard, and ready to be born, I’ll turn around and grab them.”

(Particularly applicable for blogs, and poems, and stories and essays…)

Ora et Labora: How Physical Activity helps my Creative and Spiritual Life.

By Anita Mathias

I recently went off routine into a funk.

This had been my schedule: Wake, pray, and then read scripture, and blog about it, or whatever the Holy Spirit is bugging me about. This took about two and a quarter hours.

After which I did some housework and decluttering for an hour. Then gardened, another hour. Then a walk for over an hour, after which I settled down to literary writing, working on my memoir and a short story, until nightfall–with breaks for meals, and to hang out with Irene and Roy.

However, with this long mid-day break, my memoir and story was getting squeezed.

So I cut the gardening, cut the housework, reduced the walk.

* * *

And my life became hugely less satisfying. Turns out I needed the time tidying my house and getting rid of everything “not beautiful or useful.” I needed the hour in the garden. I needed my long walk.

These were times when I unconsciously process and come to terms with, or find solutions for, my life’s minor frustrations, just as the unconscious mind does when we sleep. These were times when ideas come, and when I pray, and when my vision jells for the next hours, days and weeks. They can even be times of revelation, of hearing and sensing God.

So cut all those blessed times in which I was a human being, and not a human doing; in which I was a body and spirit and emotion-full being, and not just a mind; cut those times to stretch, relax and move—and what happened?

* * *

Well, for a few days, I fell apart. [Read more…]

On Long Walks, Spirituality and Creativity. And Images of Lucca, Tuscany, Italy

By Anita Mathias

I discovered a new pleasure this year which has become vital to my spiritual life and my ability to hear and God; my emotional balance and shalom; my psychological well-being; my ability to deal with stress; my creativity, and my happiness.

And no, it’s not prayer, though prayer, theoretically, offers all these benefits.But we are body as well as spirit, and so it is something akin to prayer–long walks.

* * *

I started long walks in January because I had signed up for a pilgrimage to Tuscany on the Via Francigena.

I was not fit, and have not found it easy to acquire the new habit of long walks every day. There have been many, many days lost because it was cold, icy, rainy, or I was too absorbed in my writing.

But I have got back to the stamina I had 16 years ago, when Zoe was 2, and I used to walk with other mums, pushing her in her stroller, for the whole 4 mile trail in Kingsmill, the beautiful resort-like community in Williamsburg, where we lived for 9 years.

* * *

It’s just a first step. Having been sedentary for so many years, four miles is a challenge! And my speed, I have discovered is not yet normal-person-speed.

So here I am on this pilgrimage in Tuscany on the Via Francigena, and I quickly discovered that I hadn’t trained sufficiently!

So I am doing a “pilgrimage lite” which has included exploring: San Gimingnano on Sunday, Volterra on Monday, Monteriggioni and Siena on Tuesday, more Siena today.

* * *

One of my personal mantras is, “If you can not succeed, fail better.” Success is the result of a dozen, or a hundred “better failures.”

So though I have failed in my training for this pilgrimage—I did not get my stamina up to 11-14 miles a day (more like 4!) or my speed to 2. 25 miles an hour on hills—I am going to continue long walks, which give me the opportunity to spend long concentrated hours with God, and tie in with my love of travel.

* * *

Oh, I love travelling. I am, sadly, somewhat addicted to books, reading, writing, and the internet, and getting away is the only way to unhook myself from these things.

Getting away re-sets my mind. Left to myself, I begin to run down after some time. It takes me longer and longer to get going, and longer and longer to get my work done.

After a break, however, I come back with a new mind. Refreshed, able to read fast, think fast, write fast, and write for long hours.

* * *

Also, it is, sadly, easy for me to get my life, my heart, my spirit, and my schedule slightly unaligned with God. And, if one is even slightly unaligned with God, if you lean slightly away, what you land up with is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Very beautiful still, but, well, if it were not shored up by engineers and millions of euros, a disaster in the making.

But when I travel, when I walk alone contemplatively, when I walk in the hills or on the beaches, praying, I slowly re-align myself with God. I ask if I am on the right track. I ask him to reveal the plans he has for the next six weeks of my life, and the next year, or decade.

* * *

We explored bits of Switzerland, France and Italy last month in our camper van. And just on our way to Dover, we were caught in the most dreadful traffic jam and were barely crawling. I’m reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, which was also on my iPod, but I can no longer easily read in a moving car.

So Zoe suggested listening to the book, and following along, as a dual pleasure which I did for a bit, and enjoyed

And then, I thought, “Heck why all this striving? I am the child of a good God. Let me just rest in his love.”

I thought of Wordsworth’s poem, “Expostulation and Reply,”
“Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum

Of things for ever speaking,

That nothing of itself will come,

But we must still be seeking?

Ah, doing nothing, resting, waiting. How alien to this modern world of scrambling, doing, achieving!

I closed the book, turned off the iPod, lay down, and rested. If God were to speak to me, fine. If not, I was content to rest in his love.

* * *

And he did speak that holiday, in fiction. Short story after story came, holy and mysterious, and I rapidly wrote them down. I told them to my husband and children; they got emotionally involved and totally drawn in. One was heart-breaking and ethically ambiguous, having come in a dream, and the children were outraged and saddened by it. I think the stories were lovely, and they came in their own tone and voice.

They belonged to a sort of dream-time, written in our camper van in Switzerland, Italy and France. I returned from holiday on August 15th, and I have not looked at them since.

What’s going on? Fear that they were not as good as I remembered? Interestingly though, letting first drafts sit is standard creative advice.

* * *

And now again on this holiday, short stories are coming, one or two or three a day, and I am rapidly writing them down.

Anyway, I need to have a plan if I am to finish in addition to my blog and my memoir. And part of having a plan is to have a trigger, a specific time/slot when I am going to write them.

So on my return from Tuscany, I am going to devote the first half-hour or so of the day to working on these stories. Quiet time, I will still have, even if I put it second; and the memoir, I am deep enough into that I will still write even if it’s in the semi-comatose last hour of the day.

And I might also work on my stories last thing at night for as long as my mind works. The writer Andrea Barrett once told me that her most creative times are first thing in the morning, and last thing at night.

So I might experiment with last thing at night, the sleepy, in-between phase, when the stern critic, the assaulter of creative work, is off dozing, and the muse appears, in her voluminous garments, and says, “Come, Dance.”

Anyway, enjoy images of Lucca which we visited last month. I particularly enjoyed walking around the city walls.

Aerial view of Lucca. The green strip round the old city is the top of the very wide Renaissance wall. (credit)

San Frediano

The Duomo (Cathedral)

San Michele in Foro

photo

The Toxicity of Unexpressed Creativity Leads to Physical and Mental Illness, and Addictions

By Anita Mathias

I love this startling chapter “The Unlived Life,” from Steven Pressfield’s great book, “The War of Art.”

The rest of this post is a quote from this prescient chapter:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever resolved on a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever felt a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be?

Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

One night I was layin’ down,
I heard Papa talkin’ to Mama.
I heard Papa say, to let that boy boogie-woogie.

‘Cause it’s in him
and it’s got to come out.
—John Lee Hooker, ‘Boogie Chillen.”

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of resistance arrayed against it. We are not alone if we are mowed down by Resistance. Millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us.

Have you heard this story? Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live. Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of studying classical Greek she gave up to raise a family. Women’s friends think she’s crazy; she herself has never been happier. There’s a postscript. Woman’s cancer goes into remission.

Is that what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence?

How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumours and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip and compulsive cell-phone use simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to? Resistance defeats us.

If tomorrow morning, by some stroke of magic, every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic violence would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraines and road rage.

Look into your heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And are you no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow? You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.”

In which Creative Blocks Crumble, and I am Set Free.

By Anita Mathias

I went on a retreat at the Harnhill Centre last month with low expectations, and it proved life-changing in the area of food.

The another amazing healing and release I experienced at the Harnhill Centre for Christian Healing was in the creative arena.

I have had a couple of tries at doing book proposals for the memoir I am writing of my Indian Catholic childhood at adolescence. I am from a small, largely Catholic coastal town, Mangalore, converted by the Portuguese in the mid-sixteenth century. I went to boarding school in the Himalayas, run by German and Irish missionary nuns, where I was rebellious and an atheist, and after a religious conversion, I impulsively joined Mother Teresa, wanting to become a nun, lasting 14 months.

I found writing book proposals very difficult, and sweated blood doing them, as my father used to say about writing letters. Because my literary writing is just that, literary, I used to despair of converting something like a book of paintings, or a book of poems into a chapter by chapter outline, a necessary book marketing tool.

But unless I learn the art of writing a good book proposal, I will not have a conventional literary career, my book in bookstores for impulse buyers.

And I want and need one.

* * *

So I tried to do a book proposal, and froze up again as I had in the past, despairing of adequately representing all that richness in a page.

Somewhere, in the process of writing the proposal, I moved from healthy striving, which Brene Brown in Daring Greatly describes as being work-focused, asking “How can I improve the work?” to perfectionism, being “Other-focused” asking “What will they think?”

We discuss this, and I am actually in tears of frustration about this writing block.

And Gary, the South African counsellor, asks, “What does God think about your book?”

I think of my book, chapter by chapter, and I can see God smile. He remembers the richness of the life I was describing. He was right there during it, and he likes the way I am remembering it, celebrating it, re-enjoying it. “God likes my book,” I say happily. “He likes it!”

I suddenly flash back to a beautiful memory. A Swedish YWAM team had come to Minneapolis where we lived in 1991-2, and performed a passionate, graceful dance interpretation of a worship song: “He’s the Lord of creation, and the Lord of my heart; Lord of the land and the sea.”

Their dance was worship. And I saw my writing as a dance of worship. I will worship my Lord with words dancing on the page.

* * *

And when I came home that changed my approach to my book.

I could write more happily, fluently, confidently, writing in the river of God’s power, that river flowing and coursing through me. When I am stressed, I slow down and ask that river to flow through me again.

I forgive whom I have to forgive. I repent of what I have to repent. I want NOTHING blocking the flow of the river of God’s life into me.

When I wrote on my own, I wrote the best I could. Now I write with Jesus’ power in me, with some of the mind of Christ, chatting to Jesus as I write, and knowing he likes what I am describing of the life he has given me, and when I have finished, he will say to me, as we say to our toddlers who have done their very best, very beautiful art, “It is very good.”

I am trying to create beauty, and need to focus on that, not on the gate-keeper’s reactions. The block of fear and paralysis that I could not adequately represent the book in a book proposal has been lifted.

* * *

And, incidentally, part of my trouble with book proposals was that I did them with a bad attitude, resenting the time taken away from literary work by this career necessity.

I received an excellent piece of advice last month from Brandy: the way around the book proposal block is not to grudge the time and effort it takes to create one, but to think of it as art itself and so do it whole-heartedly.

I think blocks are caused by a lack of confidence, by a false belief that we cannot do what, of course, we can jolly well do. And by a fear of adverse judgement.

The prayer minister at Harnhill mentioned that blocks are caused when we cannot forgive ourselves or other people in the area in which we are blocked. Ooh, that’s another can of worms for me to open!!