Creative Flow
Welcome to our Symposium on Motherhood and Creativity - More Organic Than It May Appear. We are stunned by the quality of pieces we’ve been able to curate from mothers who are are writers and artists, and are very pleased to be able to host this conversation.
The conversation first appears in the print magazine, with pieces from Suzanne M. Wolfe, Shemaiah Gonzalez, Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis, and Jody Collins.
It is very odd. At exactly sixty-one years old, I inexplicably started writing again. It just erupted from somewhere within me and poured out in spontaneous word upon word. Impressions, images, poems. Metaphors, long dormant, broke cocoon and flew about my brain in a flurry of meanings attaching themselves to everything I knew. It became a breathless chase to catch them on paper before they flitted away. I had become unaccustomed to inspiration - had somehow forgotten what it felt like - the exhilarating exhaustion of giving birth to thought. My usual, non-eventful walks around the park each day suddenly held out almost tangible, deeper, spiritual meanings to me in the guise of flowers, trees, skies – all clamoring to be heard, all shouting out a joy that demanded to be expressed through me. I could barely keep up.
I had the sensation of waking from a long hibernation, blinking wide-eyed at the world outside my cave and being suddenly dazzled - dazzled by a world I had been seeing for years to no great effect. I cannot tell you why except to say I was experiencing a sudden, inexplicable bout of creative flow taking over my sixty-one-year-old self. I had not sought it. I had assumed myself far beyond the age of inspiration. I had not sought, but it was given. Creativity is always a gift. It suddenly possesses. It inspires. It startles. It shocks the soul awake with colors heretofore unseen. It pulls music out of thin air. Creativity weaves poetry in and out of ordinary things and wraps them in the extraordinary like some fairy godmother wielding a profligate wand. It is mystery. It is a conundrum.
The Medievals had this lovely phrase they used when they could not explain certain sudden occurrences in the world of nature, “Spontaneous Generation,” the thought that things just “poofed” into existence out of nowhere. I find it a delightful thought, though our more modern scientists might scoff and shake their heads anew at the naivete of those poor, deluded, Medieval boobies. It is bad science, I will admit. Terrible science. But I must say their hearts were absolutely in the right place, especially when trying to explain something as mysterious as birth and the creating “other” – Christ – who breathes all things suddenly into existence with a bold, “Let there be!”
Nowhere were the Medievals more convinced of this notion than in the mystery enshrouding the butterfly. On the Scala Natura – the ladder of nature that they constructed to explain the order of importance in God’s world, insects occupied a low rung, right above plants and coral. But butterflies were a delightful exception. You might say the Medievals were quite flummoxed by the mere existence of something so exquisite as these “flowers on the wing.” In her delightful book The Language of Butterflies, Wendy Williams conjectures:
Butterflies were special. Highly revered, they occupied their own private rung on the ladder, well above other insects. They were granted this privilege in part because of their mystery. They appeared to emerge spontaneously from hidden places and to fly off to the heavens. They seemed blessed by God.
Creativity is very much like Medieval butterflies, I think. Elusive, coming out of nowhere from mysterious places, hard to catch, to pin down, but always dazzling. If anything were to be “spontaneously generated” like butterflies it would be creativity! At this point in my little reverie, however, I hear the slight, insistent cough of science: “Ahem, but remember it isn’t true.” Science seeks to enlighten me. I follow. Reluctantly.
Science asks me to recall the life cycle of the butterfly I learned as a child. This cycle was discovered by the sharp and observant eye of one Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th century woman who had an obsessive passion for observing caterpillars. She took her rudimentary magnifying glass and intruded on their world with shocking voyeurism. They did not seem to mind. She drew them, painted them, and discovered a startling truth. It is from caterpillars that butterflies are born, and from butterflies are caterpillars born again. Maria discovered them mating on the wing, she found their eggs on the bottom of leaves, she watched the small caterpillars emerge from the eggs and eat their way voraciously through thousands of leaves before falling asleep in their ugly, dull chrysalis only to unfold as the exquisite thing we call a butterfly. They were not each on a rung of the ladder. They were dancing together in a circle. The Medievals would have been appalled, to have something as otherworldly as a butterfly emerging so ungracefully from the disturbing “goo” in a broken chrysalis? Unthinkable! but absolutely true. Maria also discovered something else. Certain caterpillars always turned into specific butterflies and those butterflies always laid their eggs on specific flowers or plants, a little eco system turning in a widening circle all its own. I found myself gasping a little when I read about this discovery. Creativity IS like the butterfly, but not in the way I originally thought.
A writer’s thoughts do not spontaneously generate out of thin air, though sometimes it may feel that way. A writer is part of a very specific eco-system, so to speak. My own writing has emerged from the singular chrysalis of family life, from the unlikely “goo” of being a stay-at-home mom. Tell anyone you are a stay-at-home mom and you get that sympathetic disdain dripping in the words, “Ohhh, interesting.” Hardly any person in the modern world would even place full-time motherhood on any rung but the bottom. It would be near impossible to convince anyone that creativity is born of such chrysaline habits as feeding, changing diapers, entertaining toddlers, and making dinner day in and day out. Creativity belongs to the bold, the seekers of fortune, the young, the liberated, those who seize every experience in their two hands, who travel and see the world. They dismiss motherhood with a too quick disdain as unfortunate and as incorrect as the most deluded Medieval. To my discredit, I believed them for a time.
I WAS creative as a young woman. I wrote stories, poetry, acted in plays, dreamed of garrets in New York City with the best of them. I had the unique experience of spending a few years in a Monastery and I learned the beauty of prayer and silence and yet also suffered deeply for the first time in my life in that place. I traveled to France and felt the romance of Paris seep into my bones. I read in many a cafe. I sipped wine. I wrote lines of bad poetry that made me feel tortured. This was the writer’s life! I could boldly assert that creativity was mine by right! Then, out of the blue, I was surprised one day by – love - and could not resist. I have been married 31 years since.
In that time, I have birthed five babies and adopted two. We lived in a quirky, two-family flat converted into a house. I lost whole years of sleep, felt quite brain dead at times, and was convinced that I would never again read anything beyond endless loops of Peter Rabbit for the rest of my life. My coffee was cold. Poetry simply did not exist. Paris was only a dream within a dream. I listened to the nay-sayers and felt I had no other choice. I bid farewell to creativity and released it to more worthy souls than I. I assumed it flew. But it merely went dormant.
There is a kind of magic in resignation of this sort. You stop looking backwards. I slowly started taking in my little domestic eco-system with new eyes; this place where I had been planted. I saw that there were things to consume that were good for spiritual food. I ate voraciously. Little, brilliant insights coming out of the mouth of a 4-year-old. I wrote them down on the back of a formula label. The day my 9-month-old discovered his shadow on the wall and reached out his hand to touch it in awe, and I captured it on a tiny little instant camera sobbing quietly behind him in wonder. I remember reading all the story books with all the voices because I missed the theater life of bygone days so much. Suddenly little voices began to mimic mine, and I witnessed their joy at discovering that they were funny and that people laughed. What a moment – when a little human discovers laughter. I saw my children filled with grace and joy at First Communions and I shared their first angst at discovering the world is unfair and cruel. I saw them miraculously forgive from the heart, and it took my breath away. I showed them how to pray. I made little oratories with flowers I had learned to make in the Monastery. I showed them the peace of Gregorian Chant and the comfort of psalms. We celebrated feast days and I told them all about my Parisienne adventures. They swore right there and then they would do the same one day. And they did. All the classical music I loved was shared with them, and they discovered other music and shared it with me. We developed our own family lexicon of sayings from favorite movies. We fought desperately about the meaning in films, books, and poems over endless plates of spaghetti. We ate voraciously of simple experience in our little eco system – our family’s tree of life. There is an impression of Eden in watching little children discover what it is like to grow into their humanity. That is what a mother gets to see in between diaper changes and milk spills. If she is observant, she begins to marvel at what is happening. It is a thing blessed. It is full of grace.
Sooner or later the bushes grew empty and we had eaten all the experiences that we were meant to share together. The children moved on as is only right and just. I was left in an enclosed pool of chrysaline memories, silent and wondering; waiting for what would come next. Was it all over now, I asked several times? No. Creativity, so long dormant, cracked open this silent cocoon of memories and emerged strong and fluttering to my surprise and delight. I began to gaze long at photos, to see little faces in my mind, to hear voices and relive family parties, events, both joy and sorrow. And I began to write, and write, and write. Creativity fluttered free within and around me. My memories were caught and held by pen and ink. I wrote about all of it. I remembered more. I wrote again. At sixty-one, after thirty years of silence, Creativity awoke and flew.
I was given the great gift of discovering that motherhood produces a unique eco- system of love, joy, laughter, tears, and intimate glimpses of the Divine in little faces. My writing calls to the modern world and sings that creativity is a most happy guest at a table such as this - surrounded by children spilling milk, giggling uncontrollably, fighting, hugging, asking important questions and helping each other to answer them in the most profound ways. I get to write about this world. This fantastical little Eden of beauty. This is my creative voice. I am a mother. And Paris can’t hold a candle to that.
