✨Permission to feel reverence✨

How reverence and irreverence are fundamental to creativity.

Deeper than admiration, reverence has a sense of connecting with something almost spiritual; a transcendental connection.

Sometimes it’s as if words land in my head and it is my job to commit them to paper. A lot of my poems start as sayings in my head such as my poems, ‘The Desert’

or ‘In the ring’

Both poems started with lines which, having arrived completely formed in my head, went on to become fully fledged poems.

I wrote the poem below in reverence to the way in which words float into my head.

A poetry prayer

Let me catch the words

Meant just for me,

Let me pluck them 

From the air.

Help me weave them 

With your guidance,

Help me sing 

Your cosmic prayer.

Show the world 

The deep  truth

In the silence of the space

Beneath the words you gift to me

With your presence and your grace.

You see, I think that there is an as-yet undiscovered chemical reaction that happens in the creative process. We may conceive an idea (the origin) and we may put it out into the world in words or music or visual art or dance (the outcome) but there is another part at play. I guess a more poetic way to describe it is as magic:

In Big Magic Elizabeth Gilbert writes:

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”

I think that is true. I enjoyed this essay which takes the idea of the reverence towards creativity, and poetry in particular, to a whole other level as the author, Karin Jevert writes,

‘I think the most valuable thing we can lose in this life is a poem.’

I agree with her that, ‘a poem can be like a bone in one’s body, a part of a person that can sustain their life, make meaning and bring joy and healing’.

I think that it shows the importance of taking up the calling of creativity; how being creative is an expression of our life force, of our ‘us’-ness.

Beneath the stars of destiny,

Beneath the tales, the history,

Beneath the numbing and defences,

Beneath the dire consequences,

Beneath decisions that have broken hearts,

Beneath all the adapted parts,

Beneath the blame and brinkmanship,

Beneath the self doubting censorship,

Beneath the seething condemnation,

Beneath the unspoken conversations,

Beneath the righteous raging tears,

Beneath the terror, beneath the fear,

Beneath the hulps and yelps unheard,

Beneath beneath, undeterred…

Catch a glimpse of precious alchemy.

Beneath it all, 

Beneath…

Is me. 

So how can we capture this essence of us even if we don’t consider ourselves ‘creative’?

Any way which we can tap into our subconsious and let it play will bring us closer to our essence and our creativity. This could be through dreamwork, breath-work or walking.

I personally forget all my dreams upon waking, and am constantly interrupted by family members or the dog when trying to meditate or actively spend time on breath-work, so walking has been a great chance to drop into this creative space; it’s how I wrote my dissertation!

Of course, this doesn’t just relate to creativity, but to anything in your life where you are looking for a different perspective.

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Just to throw in a paradoxical point of view, one way to improve your creative thinking could be through being totally…irreverent.

You see, if we are too reverent then we become a martyr to the cause. So we need to mix it up with a bit of tricky trickster-ness. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert again:

‘Creativity wants to flip the mundane world upside down and turn it inside out, and that’s exactly what a trickster does best. But somewhere in the last few centuries, creativity got kidnapped by the martyrs, and it’s been held hostage in their camp of suffering ever since.’

Or, to say it in a poem…

Ode to Pam Ayres

Pam Ayres, she is my hero,

(Although I studied Donne).

I’ve just got a right old soft spot

For a good old Pammie pun!

You can have your sonnets and your stanzas

And the canon of great esteem,

But I’m a ‘Dolly on the Dustcart’ girl, 

The cheeky verses make me beam.

The only issue with this, though,

Is I seem so very stuck

In a rhyming metre just like hers…

But then I could break it just like that and surprise myself.

Julia Cameron hints at this irreverence in her book ‘The Artist’s Way’. The act of letting go, of ‘devil may care’ is as integral to the process of creativity (and living) as revering the magic that is creativity (and life) itself.

If you like all the idea of this, of understanding and appreciating the magic of creativity whilst also holding it all so very lightly then I wholeheartedly recommend reading ‘Poemcrazy’ by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge.

I invite you, with reverence and irreverence in equal measure:

Speak to beauty.

Speak to the semi quaver of the song thrush.

Speak to the sunlight glimmer on skittish brook.

Speak to the hush of fallen snow.

And then listen.

For they will harmonise:

I am alive

I am alive

I am alive.