Where does your creativity come from?
Where you feel like the bubbles of your creativity come from? From inside your skull, in the space between your ears? And from that space, do you as an individual entity fire up your neural networks and conjure up something brand new? Or is there something more sprawling and entangled at play when we imagine?
“The experience of the body is less reliable in telling us what is true than cold reason” (1). Why does that statement sound so bleak? Maybe because it was a first step on the journey to existing in our heads. It was a genesis in Greek philosophy of the mind-body split that became our (Western) cultural ‘truth’. The world view entrenched when Descartes officially severed our bodies and minds. It seems we’ve internalised the duality of sentience and matter so deeply we can barely hear the whispers of our body communicating.
Because if we think of our bodies as ‘matter’, as machine-like and broken down into separate parts, then they are stifled into silence. But if we connect with our bodies as a single, sentient totality, intricately connected by our neuron-laden fascial network – then we can hear it’s intelligence. Connecting with body is connecting with intuition.
Intuition might be different from imagination, but they’re intimately linked. There’s the ‘gut feeling’ that an idea has potential, the heart flutter when you’re exposed to something new that shifts the foundations of your perception. Ideas ferment in deeply embodied states of movement or meditation where there is space for full body intelligence to make itself heard. Embodied creativity is a slow process, like all things that are worth doing tend to be. It’s not a lightbulb moment, more a slow sunrise of a realisation. We need to slow down so we can listen.
Considering creativity as a full-body experience is to “remember and rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence” (2). Remembering that we are organic beings, that we are part if nature, is the maybe another thread to follow is search of our imagination. The enlightenment thinking that hobbled us with the conceptual separation of mind and body, also wrenched humans out of nature. Fixating ourselves on the superiority of rational man, our more than human companions have fallen silent to us.
Have we flattened out our creativity by not listening to the messages of the wind? Of our animal kin? The animate world is the very thing our sophisticated senses are designed to perceive and participate in. If ‘animism is normative consciousness’ (3) but we’ve narrowed ourselves to only receiving the immediately obvious information conveyed in words or through screens, then we’re left with the foggy feeling that there’s ‘something missing’. We need to exist and participate in relationship the alive world for our imagination to have fuel. Without it, we’re not seeing the whole entangled, pulsating, interdependent picture. Imagination is collective, “In indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is in relation to places, people and phenomena in the landscape”. Ideas in the abstract are flat and fleeting, understood in the mind but not felt in the body.
So where does imagination live? Maybe in dialogue within and beyond our bodies. In the “sensuous and sentient life of the body itself” (2) and in listening to the more than human entities that surround us. Being creative is being receptive, it’s participating fully with our internal and external landscapes. It’s the expansive remembering that we are part of something bigger. Creativity is collective, we don’t have to imagine better futures alone.
Embodied, participatory creativity needs time to nurture, it needs quiet space to expand – things that can be hard to find. That’s why we started this project, to make those spaces. To weave together embodied practice, ritual, nature connection and community to nurture creativity, new ideas. We’ll be sharing details soon of our first residencies, where these ideas will guide the experience we co-create. If you’re interested follow us here or Instagram.
