‘ Clearly creativity emanates from something that rises, rolls, surges, and spills into us rather than from something that just stands there hoping that we might, however circuitously, find our way to it. In that sense we can never “lose” our creativity. It is always there, filling us or else colliding with whatever obstacles are placed in its path. If it finds no inlet to us, it backs up, gathers energy, and rams forward again till it breaks through. The only ways we can avoid its insistent energy are to continuously mount barriers against it, or to allow it to be poisoned by destructive negativity and negligence. If we are gasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the water spill juncture between the headwaters and the tributary. Perhaps one’s creative waters are flowing through a polluting environment wherein the life forms of imagination are killed off before they can grow to maturity. More often than not, when a woman is bereft of her creative life, all these circumstances are at the root of the issue……………

….. Sometimes it is not only the woman who is drying out. Sometimes, essential aspects of one’s micro-environment— the family or the workplace, for instance— or one’s larger culture are caking and cracking to dust also, and these affect and afflict her. In order for her to contribute to helping aright these conditions, a return to her own skin, her own instinctual common sense, and her own return to home are necessary. As we have seen, it is hard to recognize our condition until we become like seal woman in her distress: peeling, limping, losing juice, going blind. So it is a gift from the immense vitality of the psyche, then, that there is deep in the unconscious a caller……….. who rises to the surface of our consciousness and begins to incessantly call us back to our true natures…..’  Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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