“Our creations make doorways in the dark for others to slip out of the status quo and into the magic of greater possibility.”

—Lucy H. Pearce (Creatrix)

I started reading Creatrix, published by Womancraft Publishing, during our last week at the beach this past winter. I am a fast reader and yet it took me months to finish the book. I worry sometimes that people think that means I didn’t like it, but on the contrary, it often means that I liked it so much that it takes a long time for me to process it. In this reading, I was once again stunned and touched by Lucy Pearce’s beautiful, inspiring, and sometimes uncanny ability to reach through the page directly into the very heart of things—sometimes things unvoiced, unspoken, unconscious, invisible, and then there they are…right in front of me suddenly, on the page, woven into form by this remarkably gifted woman. Somehow, again, she names the unnameable.

It was liberating, inspiring, and startling to recognize within Creatrix so many of my own feelings and experiences of what it means and what it feels like to create, to live a creative life, to mother and create simultaneously, to make room for rivers of inspiration around the cracks and corners of an everyday life. One of the things I also enjoyed about the book was the acknowledgement that there is a beautiful integration to making a life and a living through creativity, but it also means that you, and only you, are also responsible for building in time to replenish, to rest, to take a “time out.” This can be extremely hard to do in a capitalist society as well as in the economic realities of keeping employees employed and keeping a household funded, especially when there is a lingering threat of scarcity in the air. It is also vital, so that the there is still a creative well to draw upon.

Creativity…
It is sharp-edged and fierce,
ferocious and tenacious,
worn at the edges
and molten at the core.

This audio is both an extended book review of the book and a treatise of my own on the challenges, triumphs, joys, and difficulties of living a life as a creative person.

(Note: In the audio, I reference another book of Lucy’s, Moon Time, and I couldn’t remember the date it was published. It was first published in 2012.)