Being open to the desire to create

by DRM

How can I pos­si­bly artic­u­late the flame inside me? Can it ever relate to the world out­side? And if so, is it that I can­not help but take a step, yet will never make a cor­rect one?
excerpted from the drm­stream Face­book page

I could have asked this ques­tion once. My voice would have cracked, tears welling in the cor­ner of my eyes, the ques­tion so utterly impor­tant to me, and, even as I asked I knew the answer, that I was fight­ing a los­ing battle.

The empty feel­ing that I strug­gled with every time I sat down to work even­tu­ally beat me down. I stopped cre­at­ing. I went away from writ­ing. And for 15 years I pre­tended that I had never writ­ten, that I didn’t want with all my heart to share the mys­ter­ies of the world I expe­ri­enced, to explore it, cel­e­brate it, won­der in it.

I came back. I was a lucky one.

I don’t like to talk about it. The long spell away was painful, core to who I am but some­thing hard to relive, and Art has taken me back like a prodi­gal son, filled with love and celebration.

When I see a young soul strug­gling with the desire to cre­ate, filled with doubt and uncer­tain in their own iden­tity, I want to reach out and gather them in my arms, say, “Don’t look back, don’t look around, just look for­ward, fol­low the thing that you see and accept the joy it offers.”

They prob­a­bly wouldn’t lis­ten, just like I wouldn’t when I was a young man.

A brief appre­ci­a­tion of Matisse reminded me of the tremen­dous power of a life that is open to the desire to create.

Matisse worked through his life with so much joy in the expe­ri­ence of dis­cov­er­ing new things. What he knew best was the impor­tance of love: of the self and the world around you.

He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and noth­ing holds him back.
Henri Matisse

I wasn’t able to write again until I learned to trust the pure power of love.