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| The leaves tremble and the cottonwood tree releases her starry light. |
Fecundity is a shiny word with so many meanings. As an artist I use this word to denote powerful personal productivity, natural growth, rich mental ability and fluidic creativity.
What wishes to grow and create inside of you? What would natural growth look like if you released the limits of comfort and indebted service? See the cottonwood spread her snow everywhere. Her seed is both beautiful and worthy of attention. What if you grew and reproduced from your own pure rootstock? How would the world benefit? How would you live the life that you yearn to live?
For me, creativity comes often in the form of poetry. I consider poetry to be more than some clever or cute arrangement of idealistic sounding words. And sometimes it's more than personal therapy. I think of poetry as a prescription for soul loss, a prescription to annoy and soothe a society that is numbed by the sensational, medicine for a society that bypasses the beautiful and true.
Your winding way of wondrous artistic expression is a healing path too.
It seems that many of us either live by analyzing with intellectual prowess or by performing as actors in a play we did not write. We are often hooked on the academic or the ecstatic. I'm wondering what thin, vaporous membrane lives in the middle of these extremes? What incorporates the roots and the airy branches in a living synergy?
Poetry, or any creative effort, may ask us to live between the common and the unreal. We, as creatives, may ask ourselves if we want to be the ones to connect the soul of our work to the world, or live in hiding.
The cottonwood snow is an expression of fecundity that transmits living information while singing starry verses of wild exuberance. The result is a verdant woodland cleansing the air within our cities and roadways. Am I willing to release what fate, or spirit, or genetics, or God, has placed within me? Are you?
I say create from the heart, but also connect with the people that really need our dharma to be fulfilled in this numb and dumb world. Just tell your story and see it morph into THE Story... a living essence. See it grow into a story that transcends even your original intention. Sprinkle a few obscurities in for the curious. Spoon a dollop of sugar for the ones craving sweetness. But most importantly let the world of people and beings and spirits feel what lives and shines between the extremes within you.
You can decide to let your art be seen and heard. If someone, even one person, can feel their pulse quiver when hearing your voice then that is the beginning of a verdant fecundity. The quivering of the pulse means an arrow of spirit and heart has touched the recipient.
I say, aim for the middle between unbridled passion and regulated analysis.
Aim for the ordinary, armed with the extraordinary song that lives inside of you.
Let the starry snow fly.
Let the seed fall where it will.
Let the wind make something real of your imaginings.
Love,
Rick
(c) Copyright, words and image, Richard Sievers, June 2015
