About The Creative Force
Intuition is the voice of the soul.
Will is the muscle of the soul.
And the Creative Force is the purpose of the soul.
The Creative Force is your purpose… to create, nurture, grow, thrive and manifest the possibilities of our world. To become what we are made to be. To find and live our voices in this world, offer our unique messages for this world. To give our gifts and see the world grow and change. It springs from Source: the divine that is Creator and Creation, that made and binds all life. The Creative Force in all of us is—for me—our unique voices, our gifts to offer the world. And they are a Force that urges us forward on our paths, that beckons when we are tired and lost, that carries us when we are most in need of finding our lives’ meaning. Your creative force is your purpose, and it will make itself known.
It’s the need to have children and see them become themselves and thrive; make art that helps us love and understand ourselves and our world—and what’s possible for us; the spirit’s need to dwell in deeper levels of connectedness with cosmos… to meditate, to bond, to reach beyond ourselves to each other, the natural world, culture, and art; to feel and grow the force that binds us, better understand it, and extend it—channel it to pursue our potential through it. The Creative Force is Source alive in us, pulling us forward. Each of us has our own Creative Force, our own gift given to us by Source that is our purpose growing and working to manifest itself—us.
I write to dwell in and understand, and share, the creative force that is my own. My Creative Force is love, writing, finding insights and connections that I share through the word. My work gravitates to the natural world; our relationships with all living things; culture and art because these are the places where Source speaks loudest in me, urging me forward along the electric line that is my own Creative Force. As I spoke to a painter friend recently, “every time I have ever been lost, it was because I forgot that I’m a writer.” As he once said to me, “I don’t do this for women or money or fame; I do this because I have to.”
Nature, art and relationships help me explore and stand in Source itself, and the insights that lead us deeper into our own purposes—our own unique Creative Forces. My creative force is a movement in, through and between art and relationships and nature because they create us, draw us out, show us the Source we come from and lead us to what we are made to be—helping us become it. If this sounds mysterious and nebulous, that’s because it is. That’s why I write poetry and art meditations, but also about the more tangible: art, our relationships, and the cultures we live in and cocreate—and can change.
Art is a vessel for our spiritual connection to all life, all possibility. It is an embodiment of our purpose, our voices, of mystery, of Source that comes through us. For some of us, art is the object, the result that our Creative Forces urge from us. It is our very purpose. The way we dwell in source and share it. Art can also be objects of connection and ritual. Art overtakes me, offers me something entirely different from me, which I can–like Source–stand inside, be immersed in, to hear a new voice, and be reminded of my own. We can decide what purpose our art will carry out, in part by hearing our own intuition.
Nature is, for me, the place I am least distracted from my own inseparable connection with Source and all life. When the world becomes too much, pulls me too far from my recognition of connectedness, I go back to natural spaces. The places we live, however manmade or natural they may be, also cocreate our cultures. Some cultures live yet still close to the natural world, and often—I find—are then ways of life that dwell in stronger recognition of Source itself, and so our Creative Forces. This may be one of the strongest reasons that I am, again and again, pulled to learn from Native First Nations that speak to me, as well as African and African-American heritages. Nature is also where I go to learn how to live, to see differently, to receive power I need. Finally, nature helps us see our own cultures more clearly, so that we can distinguish our own voices from what various cultures have tried to tell us we are or should be.
Relationships are the foundation of connection. When we live in honesty and honor of our relationships, we are in fact recognizing our interconnectedness. We are always in relation, whether we recognize it or not. We are in relation to our world, nature, each other, the art we make, our own Creative Forces and Source itself. Ultimately, when our relationships are founded in love—the mutual recognition of each other’s souls and desire to care for and nurture one another and our purposes—we are most empowered to live our purposes and do so together so that, in our connection, we create a world founded in connection and love. And, we need each other. We need our relationships to mirror back to us what we give, and let us know where we are on the spectrum of living out our own Creative Forces. How are we changing each other and our world? What impact have we had? We need our relationships to feed us, we need what others offer us as they need what we give. This is the nature of our existence. Nothing lives for itself. We live to become who we are made to be so that we can sustain others as well. This is connectedness. The river does not flow for itself. The leaves do not fall for themselves. Water sustains all other life. Leaves fall to keep the earth warm. This is Mitaskuye Oyasin. All my Relations. All my Relations are necessary and important. All of our unique Creative Forces are necessary and required—for all other life.
My hopes are many: to help us find ourselves, our voices, our purposes; to write pieces that help us find our places in and way through the world. To meditate on our nature, our cultures, our creations, our relationships, and our interconnectedness—and offer what I find. I hope to dwell in Source and therefore my own Creative Force, aligning myself with its power. And to offer my path, what I learn and find, to anyone on the same journey.
Thank you for joining me. I am honored by your presence.
Mitakuye Oyasin. ………………………. Mariah L. Schwarz
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