SITTING BY THE SOURCE. WILD CREATIVITY AS A RESPONSE TO COLLAPSING

This text was going to be about something else.

How many times does this happen?

The life we planned isn’t just written by us, but rather for us. There’s a calligraphy, inked in body and seasons of the Earth, that invites us to listen before acting, so it can be a relevant dialogue with all that lives and co-exists within us and outside of us, accompanyying us at different distances and levels.

Today I sat by the source.

I go to the Sintra Mountains weekly to get Water.

Yes, I’m well aware I could simply turn the tap on. But can we know Water’s true value if we don’t feel its weight? If we don’t acknowledge the time of its slow run across ancestral rock until it reaches us?

Do we truly know Water without feeling it, alive and wild? Because an untamed Water has a quality of fierce bravery: it is unafraid to be exactly what it is and it cleanses from us the thoughts that free Waters can harm us. Freedom does not corrupt us. On the contrary, only the lack thereof corrupts us, the constraint, the oppression of a safety where we so document each moment of our lives that we do not grant ourselves room to be the living history we were born to be, and we know not how.

Today I sat by the source.

The road was closed to traffic. I was in the company of a young Woman whom I so admire, 20-plus years my junior, but never any less of a Woman. Because defining someone by their age is also to take from them the right to be who they are, and not just counting choronogical time.
We both sat among tall trees, the filtered sunlight reaching the ground. We remained silent, listening to the simplicity and wholeness of the Waters’ and the Birds’ songs, and of the Trees, who lend their voice to the wind.

Silence is our ability to listen to all-round non-human communication, the many and multiple languagens that echo in living nature as in our intimate nature, and which ask us to strip away contents so we’re able to witness this unique, ancestral and eternally renewed communication.

I like making myself take this time to get Water from the source, to sit by the source. Because it is an exercise which allows us to again have time to feel, without cultural time devouring us and our living time without providing it meaning.

The Woman with me lives in the city. As she sat by the source, she opened her heart and cried. I said nothing, asked her nothing. But the wild Waters source was already speaking to her, and to me, carving a path for our heart simply to be what it is. Without flaws that aren’t but the alchemical compost of our virtues; without virtues which, if in excess, won’t become obsolete and ready to drop as compost. Maturity’s time requires divestment.

We enter Autumn with the blessing of the crops, which are in fact the most complete embrace of Life and Death: they hold within them the end of a cycle and the invisible beginning of another.

The ripe fruit and the seed are one, but won’t remain as one. Our maturity’s use is to be given. Generosity demands divestment and knowing that: it is not our ideas or creations that define us or give us worth. What defines us is being an unending creative force who continues providing meaning unto death, because we’re part of Earth and that’s what she does.

All these fruits we gather came from a soil made of bone, trunk, leaf and dead matter, which from dust became the seed’s nest, who thus rose to be and mature.

It is pointless to claim authorship on this or that idea, this or that action or opinion. Because what we birthed already has its own identity, if it went into the world it is connected to us, but does not belong to us.

Just like the fruit has a connection to the tree but parts from it to continue its journey.

More than making authorship a point of authority, it’s essential to practice the creative way at its highest level: we are all creative power.

It’s time for the masks that prevent us from accessing that power that flows wild in us to fall.

It’s time to close the taps, release the dams, find the rivers and springs that still run freely within us, or release those that are contained. No, trust isn’t necessary; making it happen is.

Because in a world so ill from being so numb and anaesthetised, only sensitive and wild creativity can bring solutions, as of yet invisible, but far more pertinent than the so far proven, because they’re new, and fresh, and timely.

Sit by the Fountain. Don’t expect anything special. The Fresh Water is special enough.

Wild creativity reclaims innocence hand in hand with maturity, like a child holding hands with its elder grandmother.

Wild creativity doesn’t settle for hermetic philosophies, it is a constant pursuit, under the guise of curiosity and playfulness. It doesn’t avoid falls, mostly because it wants us to learn how to fall, how to get up, how to stay on the ground when the path loses its sense and we must tread another, one previously untrodden.

Wild creativity makes a mess, miseducates, makes room for authenticity without excuses. No, we shall not be socially correct. We’ll be risk takers and scribble makers. Rag people whose patches are sewn with the thread of life. Whole because they can repair the many breaks and tears, not back to what they were, but toward the stream they become.

Wild creativity is a crop: at the same time it’s being harvested it begs also to become seed and drop the ripe fruit, to once again, humbly and resiliently, begin the growth journey, and every time is the first time.

Wild creativity destroys titles, hierarchies, and tells us that learning is a constant process, from everything and everyone, and that it’s made through the crops’ living values: harvesting the fruits, sharing the wisdom with people, animals and the soil; keeping the seeds to sow in the next cycle; preserving what is extra to have in cold times; observing and being like the tree, that sheds fruits and leaves, but doesn’t disappear in the process – on the contrary, it stands naked against the Winter, with dignity and integrity, with power in its roots and room in its heart because it knows it’s time to wait until the new beginning.

It’s not time to go after what has been, rather to know how to be where we are.

Each leaf, a skin that’s shed and becomes a warm layer of a protective, fertile ground.

The tree’s nakedness bears a home to so many little beings – it may seem poor at first sight, but it throbs with generosity.

Wild creativity dares to see God in the littlest things. A God that laughs, gets muddied and is never the same because it can be anything and lives in everything.

Reclaim your wild creativity now.

Sit by the Fountain. Protect yourself less, expose yourself more, like the tree and the living water do. Resilience is only created in the dance between convergence and divergence.

Sit by the Fountain: let the source take you where it will. No plans. Of course there will be obstacles, but no matter: there are also rocks in the riverbed and they only make it more beautiful.

Sit by the Fountain: let yourself cry the pains of the world you carry in your heart and those from the world’s heart. Only the fertile cry, the wild Waters stir within us and they need a voice.

Sit by the Fountain: let go of goals achieved as well as dreams, the materialised and the unattained.

This source is no metaphor, nor visualisation, nor meditation. It has an inner dimension but it needs to be seen and heard in the place where it truly exists. It cannot be filtered, only directly experienced.

The Fountain is a solemn place, has lots to tell and reclaims creativity, but it can’t be fictionalised. Because the source speaks of birthing the Waters, of bringing outside from within. So it cannot be solely internal.

The source speaks of connection, of intimacy with the unknown forces of Nature that are more than their image.

Sit by the source, and let the source settle into you.

It’s time we left the indolence and the cultural taming ti become rare and strange creatures, stirred by Life’s Spirit.

Practice wild creativity step by step, to recon the soul from the constraints of an overly narrow identity. We came here to breathe at full depth, not to live in restraints.

Seek out natural places, spend time without timing in them. If the time for feeling runs out we’ll kill the poetry in our lives. Killing poetry is ceasing to be able to make Love with life and wanting pleasure from they who consume us and that we consume, but that does not nourish.

Eat seasonal fruits, produced by small scale farmers. The ugly, imperfect ones, come from the source that is the earth made tree, being only what they are without having to be anything prettier or brighter or sweeter.

Take off your shoes and your clothes more often. Go to natural hidden places with a friend that can keep watch in case someone else comes and dare to embrace, skin on skin, the Waters of the river, the sea, the rock, the tree, the green ground. We have to shed the foliage to embrace wholeness.

When eyes, mouth and skin talk to the sources of Wild Life, the evolutionary revolution begins. That one which turns the senses into bridges of communion and belonging to the free cycles and landscapes.

Reclaim the voice: sing your song and express your prayer, spontaneously, in the moment, as it is. Without wanting any more than to appreciate what it is.

Without an attached request or a defined goal, just the desire to charm life again, to fill it with a love that doesn’t need correct words or melodious voices to tell the essential truth of its feeling.

Express: create time in your day to pint, sew, weave, write, dance, model (pottery, artwork), whatever the hands can make with movement, and something yours, from you, especially if your job requires rigorous discipline without creative space. There must be spaces and times that are messy and courseless. Remember the Water is always river, even if it’s borrowed from a tap.

Look people in the eye when you talk to them, sustain the gaze. If we don’t see ourselves, how do we know who we are? If we’re not seen, how can we be known and understood? How can we know anyone?

Leave some blank space: just as I’m leaving here. For any other ideas that aren’t mine but yours, and that can support this journey back to the Fountain, to the place of Wild creativity.

Do you feel yourself collapsing? Learn to fall, like Water.And then flow and irrigate, nourish the thirst of everything and everyone you touch.

Is everything around you collapsing? Yes, learn to let the fruits go like the Tree does, preserving the wholeness of being Root, at once firm and flexible.

Are we here to be happy? Of course, but not only that. A Love that knows no pain, and expands, and transforms through it, is not Love, it’s a little romance.

Have a good harvest season, where we harvest as much as we’re harvested.

And to close the circle, just so the purpose of sitting by the Fountain isn’t forgotten:

FEEL YOUR SELF AT THE SOURCE!

That’s the Soul’s and the heart’s real path, where we are inseparable from the Web of Life, where all affects us and we affect all. It is, thus, here that the Sacred dwells.