Unblocking
"Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light.”
Matthew 6:22 (MSG)
Life hasn't been so easy these days. It’s been a long season of loss, loneliness, grief and disappointment. Some days are easier than others. But recently, along with some friends of mine, we just hit a point where the weight was heavy. We decided it was time to go on a short retreat, to give space to listen and rest. It was a refreshing time and we found ourselves talking a lot about how to 'unblock' creatively. Sometimes we get so full of clutter and we get stuck in our heads overthinking. This was a time to slow down, let go of a lot of that, and 'cleanse the vessel' so that creativity can flow.
I remembered something that Adrienne Lenker shared in the songwriting class that I took: “[Songwriting] lifts me out of the heaviness of being a physical being and connects me into something that's indescribable”. It’s something I wrote about in the Magnify Tokyo magazine that I made with some friends - an article on beauty and transcendence. There is something wonderful about art, music, creativity - it has this way of bringing us in touch with something higher than ourselves, something we can’t quite put into words. For me, it’s something divine. It connects me with God.
Sometimes, when I’m hitting ‘creative block’ it’s simply that I’m kinda blocked internally with just a build up of junk - of stuff. It takes a healthy rhythm of letting go of the clutter, and giving everything to God in prayer, to reach a place of peace and actually make space for creative work to flow. It reminds me of one of my favourite poems:
“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.”
I have been trying out a new video journaling format recently. I shared my thoughts and clips from this time away in the following video on my YouTube.