Creating Your Own Myth

Have you ever written a myth of your creativity?
What are its origins? It's birth?
Who are the parents?
Who are the naysayers? What are the stumbling blocks?
Who helped your creativity to take root? To blossom?
Were any of the helpers from the darkside?
What dragons or monsters did you have to slay?
What part of you did you need to die to?
How did you triumph?

Remember, this is a myth... You don't need to feel you have
triumphed yet with your creativity to write a myth.

Writing the myth might be a turning point.
And remember, don't think... Let your creativity, your imagination fly
free and be your guide.


Please post your myth to the blog.

In Solitude...

In solitude I bequeath myself to myself.
In solitude I am.
In solitude the core of light envelops me.
In solitude I am.
This is the journey:
to enter the quiet, to enter the solitude of being
without busy-ness, without fear;
to find that space daily.
In the core of I Am.
To remember and accept
the invitation
to step in...

Prompts for Opening to the Deeper Journey of Creativity

Here is the second in the series... please feel free to post what you have written.

2. Where are the places where you can feel your own strangeness? Go there and be as strange as you wish.

Prompts for Opening to the Deeper Journey of Creativity

Here is the first in a series... please feel free to post what you have written.

1. Journey me home to myself...

Being the Rose

is color softness layers of time
folding, unfolding
softly I tell you my story
careful to include my fallen leaf
& the long climb from the bottom of my
cool stem, my leaves feel smooth and some are folded
The gracefulness of my being comes to
you and soothes you. My beauty
and life force greets you. there is
more to feel. some of my petals open
some never will. I love you and
bring you life.

by Susan Calvert

Susan wrote this during our Creativity Circle, Spirit of the Wind, Carry Me Home. The circle is held the second Tuesday of every month in Emily's home in Westchester. County, NY. The next circle is this Sunday, May 21, 3-5:50. Explore the Circle.

Explore Being the Rose exercise...

The Alchemy of Unattached Creativity...... Part 2

The Quality of Yearning

(Read Part 1 first...it's just below...)

Let’s look at the word “wanting”. According to Webster’s wanting is derived from the Middle English and Old Norse words meaning wanting, deficient – wane.
Want comes from a lack… I am not successful. I want to be successful... I have not made my mark. I want to make my mark… I am not creative. I want to be creative… I am not…I want… I am not…

This kind of thinking will, like the hamster wheel, keep you going endlessly around in circles, wanting, wanting. Instead, try this: want nothing. Sound impossible? It’s not. Wanting is a dry well. It is antithetical to creativity, which is born out of the richness of undiluted possibility.

What’s the alternative to wanting? Let’s look at the word yearning. According Websters, yearning is derived from Middle and Old English, Old German and Norse words meaning desirous, eager, willing, Latin to urge, incite, encourage, cheer, Greek to rejoice, enjoy and Sanskrit haryati he likes, yearns for.

That’s quite a blood line for a world and what a different approach! Wanting derives from deficient and wane, while yearning derives from desirous, eager, urge, incite, encourage, cheer, rejoice, enjoy.

Is this discussion merely word play? I don’t believe so. Rather, I think it goes to the core of what makes us both shy away (sometimes bolt!) from our creative desires. Wanting has nothing to do with creativity and the creative journey. How can it when wanting has such an empty resonance? Yearning, on the other hand, is rich with the resonance of the flowering of human heart and the joy of possibility. Yearning is immediate. It is eager, filled with urges, it goads us on, encourages, cheers, rejoices and enjoys. This is the kind of passionate immediacy that precludes judgment and evaluation and, therefore, is outside of the success or failure syndrome of the outer world.

The Alchemy of Unattached Creativity.... Part 1

Why Do We Impoverish Our Lives With Wanting?


“Your heart will give you greater council than all the world’s scholars.”
~ The Talmud


The creative flow is an organic process that embraces and defines us when we open to it from the heart and not the mind. Its success cannot be defined by fame and fortune. Its success is a deepening of soul, a greater awareness of the expansiveness and truth of our being and our purpose in life as well as our connection to others. For as we serve our own deeper truth, we are serving as a guide into the deeper truth of the greater society. Creative spirits have been historically and mythically the light bearers for human kind. We are the risk takers, those who journey beyond the boundaries of human consciousness into the Mystery where knowings that serve as keys to destiny can be found.

When we become skilled practitioners of creativity, we journey with a kind of unattached consciousness. By this I mean, we are mindful that we are on the journey without needing to control the journey itself or its outcome. We are present without needing to control. Lack of control is vital. Lack of mind/ego control, that is. For creativity rises up the great seething chaos of the unmanifested and moves towards the manifesting of that which has not been before. Creativity embraces the unmanifested and brings it to the light. This is the ongoing journey of transfiguration of the human soul and creativity is its midwife.

To be “successful” in creativity we cannot lust after outcomes. This does not mean that we do not desire to have our book published, our play produced, our song heard, our garden flower, our path known. It does mean that we have to, as Emerson said, "Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience."

Does nature want her flowers to bloom, her grass to green and her sun to shine? Does nature want day more than night or summer more than winter? Does nature, the most creative force in life, want anything?

Limiting Beliefs About Your Creativity

What does creativity mean to you?

How do you express your creativity?

What limiting beliefs do you have about yourself as a creative person?

Which of these limiting beliefs can you feel slipping away?

Which seem impossible to let go?

Close you eyes and ask for an image of what your life would look like if you let go of all your limiting beliefs??

Some thoughts on creativity...

What we yearn deeply to be, we already are.

Our birthright stirs in the beating of our heart. Our creative expression holds the key. We yearn, struggle, fear, flee and sometimes touch that birthright. Only to run again. Forget again. Forget our creative source, our creative being.

The deeper journey of our creative endeavors is about remembering... about touching with love the deeper creativity that takes us home. What that deeper creativity is holds potential beyond our mind’s ability to conceive.


What is the source of your creativity?

What is your vision of home?

Emmy, My Love

by Emily Hanlon


I wrote these poems after the journey we took at my workshop, Creativity, the Journey Home, in April 2006.


Emmy, My Love

Are you the darling twin I have longed for all my life?
Have I sought myself inside myself,
not knowing
I am
my own true love?

Who were we when we did not know,
when fear strangled words,
and sorrow dimmed the song?
What visions did we seek, together alone?

I lay you down in the heart of the Mother Bear.
There, in the soft warm flesh
I give you birth.
Self unto Self, Emmy, my love.
I am.

Walk with me now
in sweet days of innocence.
I give you comfort,
you give me joy.


Emmy 2

I throw you high into the air.
Wheeee!
You twirl, laugh free.
The words come.