Creating from the Deep Well

Over the last year, I’ve spent some time at holy wells. Each is different. Some exposed to the sea air; some tucked within forest; some hiding in plain sight on the edge of pasture. So many, yet none entirely the same.

When we talk about creativity, there’s a lot of conversation about wells, too. There is getting in touch with your inner well. There is refilling the well. There is feeling like your well has gone dry. Sometimes we feel like we’ve boarded the well over so deeply we can’t even find it anymore.

At the risk of carrying this metaphor too far, let’s ask this question: How do you get to your inner well? When we’re so used to it bringing up water, invisibly, below the surface, how do we access it when we need it? How do we tend it when we fear it’s gone dry?

Sometimes the answer to this question is prosaic. It’s needing to read more books, or watch more movies, or go to art galleries—bringing more of other people’s creativity into our lives feeds our own creative spirit. It’s blocking out time for yourself in the middle of a busy schedule—having a massage, going for a quiet walk. It’s laughing with your friends or finding a cause that fires you.

But sometimes…sometimes we do those things, and it’s still not quite enough. There is still this longing inside, this sense of unsettlement. I felt this way last year—perhaps, in a sense, visiting holy wells awakened the realization in me. My words felt parched. My ideas stretched thin. I reached, but couldn’t quite grasp. When I wrote, I did it with my head down, kicking the words out of me as fast as I could.

A number of things, including a brief health crisis, conspired to make me look twice—not just at my work, but the way I was doing my work.

The medicine I needed wasn’t simply taking a day off, or reading for pleasure, though those things helped. I needed something deeper. I needed my own nurturement. I needed the willingness to walk deep into myself and hold up a light to see what lay within my inner well.

I feared it would be bone dry. It wasn’t—but it was tired. It was cranky and overworked and it wanted something more.

What do you do, when you know you need to refill, but your hands can’t quite grasp what that even means?

It happened that I had the serendipitous experience of finding the most amazing mentor, and the courage to say YES to working with her for several months one-on-one. We dove deep; we did the inner unraveling, and the re-weaving. I started meditating – lotus pose, mudras, kundalini mantras meditating.

I gave myself time, and space. Gradually, day by day, night by night, I worked to release the pressure of performing the way I thought I should be, and creating in the way that feels most nurturing to my soul. I set the intention that creativity should be fun. I wanted beginner’s mind, as it were; I wanted to feel the dizzying, drunken delight of spinning words from my head onto paper, something I hadn’t experienced in an uncomplicated fashion in years. But I remembered it, in-my-bones remembered it, from when I was a younger writer.

Reader, I found it. And so can you.

Of course, I’m not perfect and this process is not complete. Each day requires a fresh commitment to creating in this way. A new way of listening. Yet the more I practice it, the more confident I feel that it can be done—not just once or twice, but as a way of life.

What did I leave behind? The pushing, the striving. The anxiety, the grasping fear.

What am I inviting into my life now? Receptivity. Openness. The courage to create without pushing, without forcing.

It’s a strange thing, but creating from a state of softness requires far more grit than working any other way. It’s the determination to live in alignment with the ebb and flow of that inner voice, knowing that you will not “pump out” 1,500 or 2,500 words every day. Allowing yourself to create because you love doing it, genuinely, not because you just want to pay your bills with it. (Though paying bills is good, too!) Some days the flow will be so intense you drown in creative bliss, writing more than you remember doing in years; other days, that inner voice will guide you to retreat, to reflect, to do something else, so you can refill.

Writing is like this. Life is like this. When we have the willingness to step down to our inner wells, to say, I choose this, to live from that space—then we are not only making our own medicine, we are giving our medicine to the world.

*

So take a deep breath.

Imagine there is a forest within your heart. The green of it rushes to greet you. It softens your edges. It eases your burdens. Let the trees hold whatever it is you’ve been carrying.

Walk on. You’re barefoot, and the grass beneath your feet is soft, smooth, slightly moist. Life trembles in every branch, every leaf, every dusty particle of sunlight. You drink it all in.

Ahead, you see a softening. A gap beneath mossy stones. A trickle of dark water.

You drop to your knees. This is what you’ve been thirsting for.

The water, when you touch it, is warmed by the dappled sunlight, and cold beneath, from the depths of the earth.

You bring it to your lips, and you drink.

—

Callie Bates is the author of The Waking Land trilogy: THE WAKING LAND, THE MEMORY OF FIRE and THE SOUL OF POWER. She is also a harpist and certified harp therapist, sometimes artist, and nature nerd. When she’s not creating, she’s hitting the trails or streets and exploring new places.

Follow her on Instagram @callie_bates, Twitter @calliebywords or visit her website at calliebates.com.

THE SOUL OF POWER

One young woman learns the true nature of power—both her own and others’—in the riveting conclusion to The Waking Land Trilogy.

“Bates brilliantly concludes an impressive high fantasy trilogy with this tale of scheming and magic.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Sophy Dunbarron—the illegitimate daughter of a king who never was—has always felt like an impostor. Separated from her birth mother, raised by parents mourning the loss of their true daughter, and unacknowledged by her father, Sophy desires only a place and a family to call her own. But fate has other ideas. Caught up in Elanna Valtai’s revolution, Sophy has become the reigning monarch of a once-divided country—a role she has been groomed her whole life to fill.

But as she quickly discovers, wearing a crown is quite a different thing from keeping a crown. With an influx of magic-bearing refugees pouring across the border, resources already thinned by war are stretched to the breaking point. Half the nobility in her court want her deposed, and the other half question her every decision. And every third person seems to be spontaneously manifesting magical powers.

When Elanna is captured and taken to Paladis, Sophy’s last ally seems to have vanished. Now it is up to her alone to navigate a political maze that becomes more complex and thorny by the day. And worse, Sophy is hiding a huge secret—one that could destroy her tenuous hold on the crown forever.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing