Trusting the Process

I was reading two books by Matthew Fox in June.  Creativity and Original Blessing.  I wrote down some quotes that were meaningful to me, and I’m pretty sure they are from Creativity, but I’ve already taken the book back to the Library (interlibrary loan) so I can’t go back and check.

“Creativity takes courage — courage to explore one’s deepest self and to let in the depths of the world’s struggles and joys, torments and agonies.  Rilke put it this way: ‘Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go.  The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.  …  This sort of derangement, which is peculiar to us, must go into our work.’” p71-2
Fox talks about imagination enlarging the soul and the heart, about the wildness that we must allow to move through us.  He talks about how antithetical wildness is to the need to control, which Fox says is “Fascist.”  “All fascism wants to kill imagination and make control into God. … We have to learn to trust the universe and its creative process.”  p 65
“There is a river of creativity running through all things, all relationships, all beings, all corners and centers of this universe.  We are here to join it, to get wet, to jump in, to ride these rapids, wild and sacred as they be.”  p66      “One reason creativity takes courage is that the Holy Spirit is no small force to let into our lives.”  p74
“Anaïs Nin once said: ‘We write to taste life twice.’  I agree.  I think we write to taste life twice, and we paint and dance and sing and compose and do all art to ‘taste life twice.’  This opportunity to taste life twice is an invitation to go deeper, to miss nothing, to tell others, to experience the joy a second time in the telling and in handing on the depths and mystery  of life.  When we behold, we become so struck by what is that we want to share.  We call that sharing ‘art.’  …  We tap into the work of the Creator whose power is ‘unceasingly glowing and burning with all the Divine wealth, all the Divine sweetness, all the Divine bliss.’”  (He’s quoting Eckhart) p77
I’m really enjoying Matthew Fox.  I feel enlarged and what? loosened?  It’s that sense of chaos, that anything could happen and that I can trust the process.  Even the political idiocy becomes flotsam on the water.  And I see how my “Sacred Sites” program is an opening for the Holy Spirit to come through.  That makes me excited again to think about doing it.
“ … becoming fruitful as a result of the gift is the only gratitude for the gift.”  (Eckhart, quoted by Fox) p78

Another quote from Matthew Fox.  It was on a loose piece of paper.
“There are practical ramifications when we experience the Divine Nothingness.  We become more ample channels for grace to pour through, less self-conscious and more trusting and certainly less in control.”   p 169

Learning to trust the process has been a long journey for me.  Having grown up in an alcoholic family, and feeling terror on a regular basis, had the consequence that I was very afraid of loss of control.  I think Kripalu was the first place where I was taught to “trust the process.”  From Painting from the Source and authentic movement I began to learn more and more how to let go and begin to trust the process.  Finally, doing Somatic Experiencing gave me a lot of experience of letting go, and learning that the process CAN be trusted.

My paintings from Painting from the Source

Sacred Sites in Ancient Keltia” is an audio-visual program using slides that I took on three trips to the British Isles, and a musical background composed by my friend Beverly Woods.

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