creative fervor

A creative fervor is upon me.  I feel it in everything I do, need it with an intensity, a voraciousness.  Without it, nothing feels quite right.  Without it, I need to scrap everything and come up with a new plan.  With it, the plans continue to show themselves in all their platinum sparkle, all of their loud beats and perfect harmonies and my hips know how to sway just right.  I'm pretty certain that creativity is my main superpower, my main source of inspiration and purpose.  It helps me problem solve, stay psyched in the classroom, in the kitchen, in the closet when I greet a new day.  It drives me to craft dance classes, write poems, find new music, look closely at the natural world.

Last night my girlfriend invited me to see, "Stomp" kinda last minute.  I watched myself get swept further and further into the percussive beats, the innovative ways to make sound.  As I became more immersed in the show, my brain began to subconsciously problem solve.  I began to shift through the issues of my day, of my week, and create unexpected ways to move through the stuck.  My brain was firing and gliding, gracefully navigating the muck of the day and creating something that was fluid, that could shine.  This fluid shine is what I want to bring into my life as I approach 42.  I want my creative self to guide all that I do, right next to my heart, alongside my empathy, in line with my rhythm and hard work.

At the start of the new year, I went to a friend's cabin with five other women.  We were committed to spending the weekend writing, each one of us at various points on creative projects.  When I arrived, all of my ladies were already tucked into their various corners of the cabin, scribbling and typing away.  There was a calm in the house, a settled sense of determination, of cracking open.  Without asking a whole lot of questions, I found my spot by the large window overlooking the lake and I unrolled my yoga mat.  The first step was moving my body, stretching her open, preparing her to go deep and go hard.  Before I knew it pages were strewn all around me, drafts of poems, piles of poems, sections of poems waiting to be organized, revised, rehashed.

The night was divine food and conversations about how much truth we tell, what the magazines don't want us to say, why our story matters.  Each one drifted back to her area when the time was right, heeded the call of the muse, of space, of purpose.  Morning caught hold of me like a torrential and unexpected storm and the first draft of the poem book, all 70 pages of her, gently fluttered together.  When I finally flew from the room, it was like I had been flung from a great cave, a great and glorious cave full of drive, of purpose, of clarity.  I devoured my breakfast, added extra spice to my eggs and avocado, experienced that hunger that only comes from a deep and heady place.

That afternoon, I skied across a frozen lake watching the Montana clouds shift in the January sky.  The air was soft and the novelty of my cross country skis gliding across the same water I had dove into months before felt surreal to my California sensibilities.  My girlfriends were beautiful and graceful in the sea of white, their voices drifting across docks and driftwood, across boundaries and borders.  We were swept up in it all together, the sacred space of creation, the divine surrender to our stories.