Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
predicament tell me they “cannot see a way out” of their so-called writer’s block, or for that matter the cause of it. Their animus is sucking all the oxygen out of the river, and they feel “extremely tired” and suffer “tremendous loss of energy,” can’t seem to “get going,” feel “held back by something.”
Taking Back the River
The Life/Death/Life nature causes Fate, relationship, love, creativity, and all else to move in large and wild patterns, one following the other in this order: creation, increase, power, dissolution, death, incubation, creation, and so on. Theft or absence of ideas, thoughts, feelings is the outcome of a disturbed flow. Here is how to take back the river.
Receive nurturance
to begin the cleanup of the river. Troublesome contaminants in the river are obvious when a woman turns away sincere compliments about her creative life. There may be only a little pollution, as in the offhanded “Oh, how nice you are to give such a compliment,” or there may be massive trouble on the river: “Oh, this old thing” or “You must be out of your mind.” And also the defensive “Of course I’m wonderful, how could you fail to notice?” These are all signs of injured animus. Good things flow into the woman but are immediately poisoned.
To reverse the phenomenon, a woman practices taking in the compliment (even if initially it looks as though she is lunging at the compliment in order to keep it for herself this time), savors it, fights off the malignant animus that wants to tell the giver of the compliment “That’s what you think, you don’t really know all the mistakes she’s made, you don’t really see what a drip she is ... etcetera.”
Negative complexes are particularly attracted to the juiciest ideas, the most revolutionary and wonderful ideas, and the most rampant forms of creativity. So, there are no two ways about it, we must summon up a clearer-acting animus and the older one must be laid to rest, that is, sent down to the archival layer of the psyche where we file away deflated and folded impulses and catalysts. There they become artifacts rather than actors or affects.
Respond
, that is how to clear the river. Wolves lead immensely
creative lives. They make dozens of choices every day, decide this way or that, estimate how far, concentrate on their prey, calculate the chances, seize opportunity, react powerfully to accomplish their goals. Their abilities to find the hidden, to coalesce intention, to focus on the desired outcome, and to act in their own behalf to gain it, are the exact characteristics required for creative follow- through in humans.
To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction that arise within us, and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or censoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being.
Be wild
; that is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. It is an entirely interior process. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. We can put out our skirts and shirts to catch as much as we can carry.
Begin;
this is how to clear the polluted river. If you’re scared, scared to fail, I say begin already, fail if you must, pick yourself up, start again. If you fail again, you fail. So what? Begin again. It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. If you’re scared, so what? If you’re afraid something’s going to leap out and bite you, then for heaven’s sake, get it over with already. Let your fear leap out and bite you so you can get it over with and go on. You will get over it. The fear will pass. In this case, it is better if you meet it head- on, feel it, and get it over with, than to keep using it to avoid cleaning up the river.
Protect your time
; this is how to banish pollutants. I know a fierce painter here in the Rockies who hangs this sign on the chain that closes off the road to her house when she is in a painting or thinking mode: “I am working today and am not receiving visitors. I know you think this doesn't mean you because you are my banker, agent, or best friend. But it does."
Another sculptor I know hangs this sign on her gate: “Do not disturb unless I've won the lottery or Jesus has been sighted on the Old Taos Highway.*' As you can see, the well-developed animus has excellent boundaries.
Stay with it
, How to further banish this pollution? By insisting nothing will stop us from exercising the well-integrated animus, by continuing our soul-spinning, our wing-making ventures, our art, our psychic mending and sewing, whether we feel strong or not, whether we feel ready or not If necessary by tying ourselves to the mast the chair, the desk, the tree, the cactus—wherever we create. It is essential, even though often painful, to put in the necessary time, to not skirt the difficult tasks inherent in striving for mastery. A true creative life bums in more ways than one.
Negative complexes that arise along the way are banished or transformed—your dreams will guide you the last part of the way—by putting your foot down, (Mice and for all, and by saying, “I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression." If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls. There is just us. We are the only ones to watch over the soul-Self and the heroic animus. It is bitterly harsh to water them once a week, or once a month, or even once a year. They each have their own circadian rhythms. They need us and need the water of our craft every day.
Protect your creative life.
If you would avoid
hambre
del alma,
the starved soul, name the problem for what it is—and fix it Practice your work every day. Then, let no thought no man, no woman, no mate, no friend, no religion, no job, and no crabbed voice force you into a famine. If necessary, show your incisors.
Craft your real work.
Build that hut of warmth and knowing.
Pull your energy from over there to over here. Insist on a balance between pedestrian responsibility and personal rapture. Protect the soul. Insist on quality creative life. Let neither your own complexes, your culture, intellectual detritus, nor any high-sounding, aristocratic, pedagogical, or political-la-la steal it away from you.
Lay out nourishment for the creative life.
Although many things are good and nutritious for the soul, most fall into Wild Woman's four basic food groups: time, belonging, passion, and sovereignty. Stock up. These keep the river clean.
When the river is cleansed again it is free to flow; a woman's creative output increases and thereafter continues in natural cycles of increase and decrease and increase again. Nothing will be carried off or fouled for long. Whatever contaminants occur naturally are neutralized efficiently. The river returns as our system of nourishment, one we can enter without fear, one we can drink from without worry, one beside which we can calm the tormented soul of
La Llorona
, healing her children and restoring them to her. We can dismantle the polluting process of the factory, seat a new animus. We can live our lives as we wish and as we see fit, there beside the river, holding our many babies in our arms, showing them their reflections in the clear, clear water.
Focus and the Fantasy Mill
In North America, the tale of “The Little Match Girl” is best known in the Hans Christian Andersen version. At its core, it describes what lack of nurture, lack of focus look like, and what they lead to. It is a very old tale told the world over in various ways; sometimes it is a charcoal burner who uses his last coals to warm himself while he dreams of times past In some versions the symbol of matches is exchanged for something else, as in “The Little Flowerseller,” about a broken-hearted man who gazes into the centers of his last flowers and is spirited away from this life.
Though some might look at the superficial story rendering and say these are maudlin stories, meaning they have excessive emotional “sweetness," it would be a mistake to dismiss them lightly. The stories actually are, at their base, profound expressions of
psyche being negatively mesmerized to the point that real and vibrant life begins to “die” in spirit.
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The following “Little Match Girl” was given to me by my Aunt Katerina, who had come to America after World War II. During the war, her simple Hungarian farming village had been overrun and occupied three times by three different hostile armies. She always began the tale by saying that soft dreams under hard conditions are no good, that in tough times we must have tough dreams,' real dreams, those that, if we will work diligently and drink our milk to the health of the Virgin, will come true.
The Little Match Girl
There was a little girlchild
who had neither a mother nor a father, and she lived in the dark forest. There was a village at the edge of the forest and she had learned she could buy matches for a half-penny there, and that she could sell them on the street for a full penny. If she sold enough matches, she could buy a crust of bread, return to her lean-to in the forest, and sleep there dressed in all the clothes she owned.
The winter came and it was very cold. She had no shoes, and her coat was so thin she could see through it. Her feet were past the point of being blue, her toes were white; so were her fingers and the end of her nose. She wandered the streets and begged strangers, would they please buy matches from her? But no one stopped and no one paid her any attention.
So she sat down one evening saying, “I have matches. I can light a fire and I can warm myself.” But she had no kindling and no wood. She decided to tight the matches anyway.
As she sat there with her legs straight out in front of her, she struck the first match. As she did, it seemed that the cold and the snow disappeared altogether. What she saw instead of swirling snow was a room, a beautiful room with a great dark green ceramic stove with a door with iron scrollwork. The stove emanated so much heat it made the air wavy. She snuggled up close to the stove and it felt heavenly.
But all of a sudden the stove went out, and she was again sitting in the snow, shivering so bitterly the bones in her face, chimed. And so she struck the second match, and the light fell upon the wall of the building next to where she sat and she could suddenly see through it. In the room behind the wall was a snowy cloth covering a table, and there on the table were china plates of the purest white, and on a platter was a goose that had just been cooked, and just as she was reaching for this repast, the vision disappeared.
She was again in the snow. But now her knees and her hips no longer hurt. Now the cold was stinging and burning its way up her arms and torso, and so she lit the third match.
And in the light of the third match was a beautiful Christmas tree, beautifully decorated with white candles with lacy ruffs, and beautiful glass ornaments, and thousands and thousands of little dots of light that she couldn't quite make out.
And she looked up the trunk of this enormous tree, that went higher and higher, and stretched farther and farther toward the ceiling until it became the stars in the heavens over her head, and suddenly a star blazed across the sky, and she remembered her mother had told her that when a soul dies, a star falls.
And out of nowhere her grandmother appeared, so warm and so kind, and the child felt so happy to see her. The grandmother picked up her apron and put it around the child, held her close with both arms, and the child was content.
But the grandmother began to fade. And the child struck more and more matches to keep the grandmother with her ... and more and more matches to keep the grandmother with her... and more and more ... and together she and the grandmother began to rise together up into the sky where there was no cold and no hunger and no pain. And in the morning, between the houses, the child was found still, and gone.
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Staving Off Creative Fantasy
This child lives in an environ where people do not care. If you are in one of these, get out. This child is in a milieu where what she
has, little fires on sticks—the beginnings of all creative possibility—is not valued. If you are in this predicament, turn your back and walk away. This child is in a psychic situation in which there are few options. She has resigned herself to her “place” in life. If this has happened to you, unresign yourself and come out kicking ass. When Wild Woman is cornered, she does not surrender, she comes ahead, claws out and fighting.