Excavating the Deep History of Creativity
We are all born with one thing in common: the impulse to grow. No baby is expected to stay six pounds, or eight pounds, or ten, for very long. The world looks on us expectantly from the moment of conception: How big are you now? And how about now? And now?
The word grow can be traced back through the branches of modern English to the hypothetical prehistoric German — the seed of all Germanic languages — and is based on the root for grass, which is also related to green. All of these words: green, grass, grow: have in common the sense of being young, of being a child, or at least of being child-like, and expected to mature. The secret these roots don’t reveal, though, is that the word “grow” didn’t refer to human beings getting bigger until the Middle Ages. Before the 14th century, we referred to ourselves as “waxing” — same as the Moon — from the Proto-Indo-European root for “increase.”
The word create also arose in the Middle Ages from the Latin creare (“to make, bring forth, produce, beget”). Creare, in turn, is related to crescere: “come forth, spring up, grow, thrive, swell, increase in numbers or strength,” which of course also refers to the Moon in its crescent phase: the word was a verb meaning expand — crescendo! – not a noun referring to a static shape.
So growing and creating are deep-rooted, fertile sisters in the world tree of words. At the base of both words is a profound sense of increase, and our understanding of how we grow and create has a deep ken with the image of the Moon — the Moon which, in Huber astrology, is the child full of feeling and need and attachment, the mirror for those around it.
And this is where is gets really interesting.
The word crescent, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European base *ker, “to grow,” also the root of the names of the goddess Ceres and her daughter, the Kore (“girl”), the Roman counterparts to Demeter and Persephone.
Demeter was the goddess of the harvest who — when her daughter Persephone was kidnapped by Hades to the Underworld as she strayed far to admire the flowers of the fields — stopped all the crops from growing and made the earth suffer terribly in her grief. Yet Persephone’s world was expanding — growing, deepening — and Demeter had to make an agreement with Hades’ brother, Zeus, to have her daughter back for only two-thirds of each year. In return, Demeter would have to make the crops grow once again, bringing abundance back to the earth.
So embedded in the etymology and mythology of the words growth and creativity – in the very personification of these words as ancient goddess-figures whose names actually mean crescent, growth, increase, and creativity — are the ideas of wonder and beauty, curiosity, attachment and separation, deepening, loss and grieving, bargaining, sharing, destruction, and renewal.
Is this not how humans are, at our most creative? We become enchanted with the blossoms of our minds and move toward them with curiosity and delight. The more curious we get, the deeper we have to go — but that requires, always, a letting-go: of the mother, the boundaries, the rules we or others have set for ourselves. If we dare to let go, we face the profound risk of being taken by overwhelming and unknown forces that may overpower us, may hold our feet to the fire while our lungs fill with water. And part of us — the more rational, less impulsive part — is left behind grieving its losses, grieving the easy predictability of its former days, tempestuously destroying all the relics of the old life, even perhaps the ones that are still useful.
And somewhere in the separation and destruction, in the battle for growth and expansion and creative fire, a bargain is struck: a reconciliation of opposites, an integration of the chaotic, creative Underworld with the ordered, productive Upperworld. What we took for destroyed can be renewed but only with the new wisdom of the Underworld integrated into our consciousness.
In other words: Creative work can steal us away into other worlds, sometimes subtly, sometimes with great drama. If we don’t allow it to steal us for a time, we remain always innocent and unscathed, walking along the surface of our depths. We experience nothing new, and safety and sameness are always assured. If we risk being stolen, we may return later with deeper wisdom, with graver knowledge, with more profound experience and insight to share with those we love — and, indeed, with all of humanity.
Without the risk, the harvest may go on, but it’s the same as it ever was. And that is not growth. That is stagnation.
Creativity — expansion, growth, curiosity, deepening, destruction, renewal — is your birthright. It’s what makes you grow. It’s your connection to worlds beyond this one, to the worlds of ancient history and deep mind and ever-expanding universe, to the worlds of old goddesses and modern science and the quivering neural filaments that form every thought, movement, and impulse of your life.
The promise of creativity, of growth, is what makes it bearable for us to be constantly green, to continually bring beginner’s mind to the flowers of the field, to gaze with surprise and curiosity when the earth opens beneath our feet, to bear the loss of our former selves, to return with wisdom — even if that wisdom is unpopular — and to stand up straight as we speak our own truths.
But it requires risk. There’s no getting around it.
In: I can't get inspired., I'm afraid to create., I'm in a creative block., I'm just not creative. · Tagged with: Demeter, Persephone
on August 19, 2010 at 8:15 am
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Thank you for this. Just . . . thank you.