BIRTHING CREATIVITY

Annually I partner with our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship's music coordinator to create a Sunday service of Music, Movement and Spoken Word.  This past Sunday, Mother's Day, was that service.  I wrote a "testimonial" for it.  Here it is:

Mother’s Day.  I have an ambivalent relationship with this day.  For many years, this day meant a reminder of something I didn’t have and desperately wanted -- children.  

Then, finally, I became a mother through adoption and during the most exhausting of those years of caring for young children I decided Mother’s Day should be a day set aside for NOT having to be with my children.  Shouldn’t it be a day when mom gets to go to the spa?  Or read a book?  Or see a matinee alone?  

On this day we hold up the ideal of mother -- that mythical being who is full of self-sacrifice and unconditional love, not the mom who doesn’t have a clue, gets it wrong most of the time, or who through bad luck, lousy choices, or impossible circumstances seems to love any number of things more than her own children.

For some of us this day is one tinged with grief.  Maybe we have lost a mother, or lost a child, and when everyone else is celebrating, we are sad.  

Any day set aside to honor can also be a day that is just tough to get through, since one size (or one commemorative day) does not fit all.

Yet, mother or not, perfect or not, grieving or not, we can reclaim this day with a shift in focus, using the best of the mother archetype and making it our own in our own way.  

The energy that goes into mothering a child is the energy that also goes into birthing a dream, igniting the spark of creativity, holding a vision of completion. 

Mothering energy is powerfully present when you love and care for a cat or a dog or a horse or a coop full of chickens...tending, feeding, doctoring, comforting -- knowing each in their own way, giving to each just what it needs, enjoying the sweet innocence of give and take between you and this precious creature you love.  

Mothering energy is powerfully present when you plant a tiny seed in fertile soil you have prepared, waiting patiently for it to sprout, then coaxing it to grow by providing nutrients, water, light, and a sturdy stake upon which to lean until it bursts into full flower, or provides food for your table, in the fullness of the harvest.

Mothering energy is powerfully present when you stand before the blank canvas, or sit before the blank page, and a germ of an idea -- a color or a word -- sparks its way from your creative source to find expression in your art.  Day by day you add, delete, expand, re-imagine, until, finally there is a painting or a poem -- gestated in your quiet, private moments, ready to be shared with the world.  You may never know how many lives you will touch by sharing this song of the heart.

Just as a mother holds her infant close, letting go bit by bit as her child grows into being herself, independent and ready to take his own place on the planet, so too does a mother of creativity hold close her idea, manifesting bit by bit a vision, growing it to fruition, to take its own place in the great fabric of creation.

To be a mother is to find that place of creation within, that place of selfless discipline, that place of overwhelming love, that place of exhausted frustration followed by heart driven re-commitment to that which we love, to that which we have no choice but to birth, nurture, and then, eventually, to let go. 

At least, that's the view from here...©