I remember back to my time studying art in graduate school, where there was a constant flow of ideas, gushing out, like hot lava from a recently erupted volcano. Red, hot ideas created from the smallest of embers. With each conversation in my studio, with my students, with my peers in my graduate seminar class, ideas burned from the inside out. There were so many creative thoughts filling me up, boiling over, that I could not produce enough images or projects to satiate my imagination.
These images from my past, also remind me of several times that I have found myself red, hot for God. A burning desire to be closer to Him, to touch the Holy Spirit, to step inside those spiritual boundaries that allowed me the opportunity to feel the grace that God desires to shine on us. During this time, Christian fellowship, discussions of His love encouraged my need to be closer to Him. Like my creativity my spiritual life grew with each conversation I had about God.
What happens when graduate school is over and you have moved on from the institution of education? What happens when you stop your routine weekly small group visits? What happens when you are alone, without support of like-minded individuals to constantly add coal to keep your flames flickering? What happens when the fire burns out?
I am all too familiar with this path. It is one that I have jumped on and off of more times that I can count. I have been reading a book called, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland and this book is more than a book about writing. It is a book about creativity, life and spirituality. One particular chapter addresses the subject of imagination, stating that it works slowly and quietly. If anyone knows me...slowly and quietly are two words I routinely toss to the side in my daily operations.
Ueland writes...When we hear the word inspiration, we imagine something that comes like a bolt of lightning, and at once with a rapt flashing of the eyes, tossed hair and feverish excitement, a poet or artist begins furiously to paint or write. At least I used to think sadly that that was what inspiration must be, and never experienced a thing that was one bit like it. But this is not so. Inspiration comes very slowly and quietly. Say that you want to write. Well, not much will come to you the first day. Perhaps nothing at all. You will sit before your typewriter or paper and look out of the window and begin to brush your hair absent-mindedly for an hour or two. That is all right. And you also must know that you are going to sit here tomorrow for a while, and the next day and so on, forever and ever. Our idea that we must always be energetic and active is all wrong. [You should] be idle, limp and alone for much of the time, not willing all the time. This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas. Willing is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it. And presently your soul gets frightfully sterile and dry because you are so quick, snappy and efficient about doing one thing after another that you have not time for your own ideas to come in and develop and gently shine.
In my effort to be more efficient about doing one thing after another, I tend to forget that silence is crucial. It has the power to reconnect me to my creativity and to God - just as at one time I used all of those conversations and daily interactions with those around me. Through quiet, patience, waiting and listening - I'll have added fire to my dormant creativity. Until I started reading this book, I never made the connection that my creativity, like my relationship with God could expand on its own accord, if I was quiet and not always willing.
~Jacqueline
...So you see the imagination needs moodling, - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering... ~Ueland
