Creative Fire

"I hope you are all creating every day according to the inner map you were born with. I know it sometimes seems that map is written in invisible ink... but you know to read invisible ink, you have to hold it over heat. Same with creative life, 'Fire, give me more fire!'"

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from "The Creative Fire" mansuscript, this quote posted at her public site at Facebook.

where potential poems
lay like unfertilized ova

a thousand rise
new moons
on the landscape of the future

I have no chromosone
starmap to offer
or helixes of lunar pearls

I wasn't born with a vision

mapless, without signs

my fire is your fire

what bursts from this undifferentiated mass, a singular
moment, astral blossom of solarity, prism of
colour, strange sapient gloss

is a response,
a spark,
the lighting of our blazing

A composite image I composed for this poem (from public 

domain and NASA images).

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I like Dr. Estes quote very much, and am inspired by her words. I've written a poem - the creative fire like an Olympic torch alighting us. Her philosophy, though, has given me pause for thought. For me there isn't an 'inner map' that I was 'born with.' While there is inner pressure to produce, my creativity is a response. It's not about my 'feelings' or particularly 'confessional,' but sparked by something I want to address. Sometimes it can be a way to work out a puzzle. What I write or paint or produce occurs in relation to my world, the people in it, a sense of spirit, a need to discover truth, a way to connect, reflect, deflect, untangle, give, discover the depths of.


                                                        

from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

Free music for professional licensing

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

This poem is now available at Jamendo, with better sound than SoundClick, and you may download it if you wish. Later on, I will be offering a reading of this abridged version of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems with another musician.

                                                        

birthdance

direct link to YouTube: birthdance

In honour of Mother's Day. Paintings and poem may be found at my website: BIRTHDANCE

On the paintings:

THE BODY IS FOR BLOSSOMING

...pigment of flesh flowing under my fingers, magenta, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cyan green, cadmium yellow, dark violet, colour so rich it's almost edible, bodyscapes of colour, landscapes of fertility, erupting in the swirl of water and paint...

When I was pregnant, my body changed in fundamental and drastic ways. It was a crisis: the freedom of an old self was dying to make way for the mother I would become.

The "Birth Series" paintings became a visual journey of my changing body, a way to comprehend what I was undergoing in the tumble of hormones as my belly grew. The paintings focus on the woman who conceives and carries a baby into life, who nourishes and awaits the child who will hopefully emerge from the nine-month gestation of her body like a dream become real.

In reaction to an increasing invisibility in the world: the averted gaze, perhaps arising out of a cultural discomfort with the swollen belly, I wished to present the pregnant body as sensual and sacred. Despite my desire to confound the categories of alluring woman and maternal body, I found myself deep in the mystery of creation itself.

At the beginning of the series, the body is portrayed clearly; as the forces of labour, birth and then breastfeeding unfold, the clarity shifts into flowing colours suggesting the transformative experience that carrying and delivering and breastfeeding a baby is.

These paintings are about a rite of passage, about the strangest body on earth, about the mind-blowing transformation of skin, belly, heart and perception of the self, as a woman ripens and delivers her fragile and beautiful fruit, the newborn, a miracle of the world.

On the poem:

BIRTHDANCE took two years to write. In 1987, after my first child, my son, was born, I tried to write about birth. At the time, I was unable to find any poetry or literature by women on what giving birth 'felt' like, on their inner birthing experience, and I wasn't sure how to express those powerful birthing hours. It took some years, and many revisions as I worked towards how to express this powerful moment of my life, and finally chose to allow the stages of labour to structure the poem. Each woman has a different experience of birth, the many stories, poems and artwork by women in the last decade or two have been an important sharing of what was previously hidden.

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The Birth Paintings and BIRTHDANCE were painted and composed from 1986-1989.

                                                        

'Dailies' by Ron Walker

Free music for professional licensing

direct link: Dailies by Ron Walker

Quietly uplifing, masterful compositions and playing...

I have many of these songs already, being a friend of Ron's partner, Laura, and listening it all comes back... why there are some nights I head out with my dog into the dark city streets and only Ron's music will do, gentle, enlivening, uplifting, a way to take you from your gloom to joy, a quiet exuberant inner pleasure that brightens the whole world... the album is composed of journey pieces, the way we journey through each phase of our lives, how each day is a journey, how we journey to each other, coming home to ourselves... love the distant Windham Hill sound, the muted Steve Reich influences... the way that tonal building increases the pulse brings excitement into the body which pours into our emotions... the piano and the flute, oh I melt... played with such sensitivity, then the rhythm catchers of the drums... simply delightful, the whole album.

The way the waves lapping at your feet that you walk on the sand through are part of and reach out to the vast ocean, the tracks move between the lyrical just edging onto the symphonic, though are fully grounded in jazz.

Makes you wanna dance on a moonlit evening in a jazz club afterhours by the ocean...

Great work, Ron... so glad you've offered this album on Jamendo.