Spring – unabashedly female

March 22, 2010

It Just Popped Out

I’ve become enamored with the idea of what can be created when we bring people, ideas and creations together, combining creative impulses, drawing upon each other’s spark. This is the second of two posts to explore this idea. Who knows, maybe there will be more!

A few posts ago, I wrote about Spring. Just as Spring is in the air, writing about Spring was, too. A very recent blogger acquaintance, Jeanie Miley, stopped by to read my post. Just prior to my post, she had visited Renae Cobb to read her post about Spring. Jeanie was inspired and whammo, “it just popped out” (the it being an amazing poem) into my comments section. Jeanie literally wrote a poem and left it in the comments. I was blown away by what I read and wanted to share it with you, so you could be, too.

It’s funny. Many months ago, I wrote a post titled Make Love to Life as if it were Your Beloved.

Now, through Serendipity, Jeannie graced this blog with this fresh, in-the-moment poetry, brought about the spirit of collaboration, through one woman sparking another into her own creative genius.

Here is Jeanie’s poem. It is sensual and free, full of eros and light. At the time she wrote it, she didn’t leave a title.

And what ifâ€¦
life itself is
making love to us,

seducing our hearts and minds
with the gentle
unfolding of buds
and blossoms?
â€¦.engaging us
with the tender and
warm embrace
of spring?

What if it is life itself
kissing us
with tender showers?
granting us
a chance to
shed our
winter doldrums
with our sweaters
and coats
and let the earth
itself bathe our
bare feet in wonder?
What if?

What if life itself is
a lover,
wanting to be
embraced and
enjoyed? What if
the coming of
spring is
foreplay?
and the fever we
call spring fever
isâ€¦..lifeâ€™s passion,
burning in us
for expression?

What if life itself
is a lover and simply
wants to teach us
the ways of love?

What if lovemaking is, after all,
our assignment on this
good earth?

As Jeanie wrote in subsequent comments:

“Julie â€” your blog post inspired me â€” and it just popped out â€” but perhaps it popped out of a bud that has been sitting on a branch for a long, long winter! I just wrote it, in response to your blog! It was so freeing and fun! Itâ€™s so much fun to be a part of a co-creation. I should have said that it was Renae who sent me to your post â€” and it was both her post and yours that inspired me to write the piece. I love the process of collaboration â€” itâ€™s such a wonderful feminine strength, isnâ€™t it?

This process of collaboration, of one writing what comes and sharing it freely, of the next doing the same, then another reading these words and allowing whatever naturally arises to be shared so freely is the way that is being born.

None of it really, when it comes right down to us, belongs to us. It is all part of the Everything and the Nothing, the Oneness that lives and breathes through us all.

What joy comes when we share what comes through us, willingly, and then revel in watching the mystery of creativity unfold right before our eyes. And in my experience as a teacher/facilitator of creativity, “It just pops out” all the time – when we’re willing to be present to it, we are ready to birth it, then set it free to be enjoyed by others.

March 15, 2010March 16, 2010

Budding With New Life

Itâ€™s a beautiful sunny spring day. Life is budding.

I live in the hills of Berkeley, directly across the street from the hills of Tilden Park. Today, just days before the first day of Spring, the hills are richly green. The birds are singing. The trees are blossoming. One tree in particular grabs and holds my attention. It is a weeping cherry tree directly across from my living room window. She is budding, ripe with the fruit of life just bubbling under the skin of her delicate branches. Her branches are stark gray in contrast to the small, delicate blossoms just now opening to the warm spring sunshine.

I am amazed at the contrast between this small, soft pink flower petal and the sage, rooted, twisted and gnarled mother tree giving birth to it. When I look closely, the petals emerge right out of the tips of these weathered branches that have survived the winter cold, the driving rains and the months of dormancy. Life gives birth to life.

And so it is the same with us. In every moment, we are dying and being born, and in our times of transformation, we descend into the darkness, move through it, and if we stay with the intelligence of our own internal guidance, we emerge out into the light, budding with new life. The darkness is just as much a part of life as the light. We need to know one to know the other. Spring follows winter, summer turns to fall.

Life gives birth to life, and somewhere in the process something dies and transforms. Itâ€™s a circle that cannot be avoided, no matter how hard we might try. The past few years have been a patient teacher to me, providing me with the most gracious teachings on what it means to be fully alive to the circle of birth, death and transformation. And in these fecund teachings, I have become both painfully and joyously aware of what it means to be alive, not as a dry concept, but as rich experience. I have been humbled by the paradox I experience: the futility of trying to control anything at all, having the direct experience of life living exactly as life does, while at the same time knowing that I have the choice to follow that which compels me forward, a knowing at the deepest levels of my being that prods and pulls and pushes me into a place of complete undressing and exposure.

Which brings me to the blog-to-blog, post to post, conversation Jeanne Hewell-Chambers and I have been having, a conversation about voice, community and action.

Mother Teresa said some wise things about action:

â€œIt is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.â€

â€œIn this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.â€

It seems as if it is easy to get caught up in the egoâ€™s desire to do big things to save the world. I know this well. And what Iâ€™ve experienced is that the desire to do big things causes me to spin into inaction, because I canâ€™t even begin to know how to save the world. Does the world even need saving? I can make up all sorts of things about what I need to do if I am to make a difference. Yet somewhere within, a small voice stirs and is guiding me forth, if only I can listen.

I have come to see, through being aware of Life and how it unfolds, that all I can do is express my love for life in small actions, one step at a time. Life knows and I am an instrument of that knowing.

We are no different than the rest of nature for we, too, are nature. Just like the flowering cherry tree, what wants to emerge through me is pushing to unfold through me. What wants to emerge through you is causing something else in you to die, so that new life can be born.

In the dying paradigm, the old way of doing things that is on its way out, there was a central belief that a ‘big’ (powerful) person has to do something big to have an effect. This one person was the leader, the one others looked up to, the one others expected to take care of things.

In the new paradigm that is unfolding, things are different. We are beginning to see the strength of communities. Strong, supportive, truth-telling communities can bring collaboration and creativity and innovation. We’re beginning to see the possibilities that are there when many ordinary people do small things with great love and focus. Networks of people coming together, learning from each other, sparking ideas and doing small things with great love is the backbone of this new model.

If it sounds like small things have no power, think again. Imagine the force it takes for new blossoms to spring forth through gray, dry branches. It’s life force. It’s the same life force that is within you. The same life force that breathes you. The same life force that causes you to feel, to think, to love and to act.

In the end, trust yourself. Trust the urge in you that wants to propel you into action. The bigger intelligence can, and will, take care of the rest.

Do all of what you do with the great love that you are.

April 11, 2008April 11, 2008

Innocence, Wonder & Creativity

Spring is here in the Bay Area in all its beauty. The other day, a friend and I were sitting outside on her balcony that overlooks her garden. We were enjoying one of the first warm days of the season. With the sun’s warmth heating up the landscape, the fragrance of spring was in the air. There was something else in the air as well…Innocence. As we looked out at the tender shoots of green making their first appearance and the myriad of blossoms peeking out into the light, we were swimming in a sea of Innocence.

On Sunday, I noticed Innocence again as I meandered through the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Cherry blossoms, California Poppies and many others all were making their debut in Spring, 2008’s show. When I feel innocence in the air, and in myself, I feel a fresh awareness in the moment.

No matter how old we get, we still have this fresh awareness available at any moment. It’s this fresh awareness that allows us to experience the vibrancy of life, quivering with aliveness. And, when we tap into this vibrancy of life, we can feel our own vibrancy, our own innocence, which can also be felt as wonder, discovery and a simple joy inherent in life itself.

When I realize this natural sense of wonder within, I awaken to the fluidity of the Now. Wonder invites me to participate with life, allowing me to remember that I am no different than that cherry blossom peeking out for the first time. I, too, am life blossoming into wholeness.

What do innocence and wonder have to do with creativity? Everything. Engaging with the flow of life is creativity, the life that you are and the life that you are swimming in in each moment. If you are not seeing with fresh eyes, you miss all that is right here now. You can’t tap into everything that is available for your new creation, your new vision, if you have your mind made up and your expectations set. When you feel a vision wanting to be born from within, allow it to move as it chooses. You are the vehicle of this creation. Feed it. Nurture it. Love it as it finds its way. And, feed, nurture and love yourself as you carry it into being.

Every day you are creating…but not by yourself. You are creating with the world around you. Innocence and wonder bring you back to the freshness of what is here in each moment, a freshness that knocks at your door, ready to teach you what it has to offer.