Creativity

Loving, loving loving, as the artist can love,

The poet in love with the world- All the senses adoring

All that is alive, courting the whole world with song,

Dancing, poetry, music, a huge passion for life

In the heart.

-Anais Nin

It is truth for me, that the creative spirit that gave form to this world is the same spirit that flows through the creation of everything still being created, by using the hands and thoughts of everyone of us.  Fostering my creative thinking is what propels me forwards, what keeps me in my aliveness.  Creativity is used everywhere, not just in the obvious artistic sense, but in the considerations we face everyday.  How we respond to any situation depends on our creativity and our ability to express ourselves.  It is emerging as the new “education”.  The amount of ways that I see my children create everyday is astounding- in fact, it really is all that they do with the given time of our homeschooling environment.  They create worlds of imagination, then create things to use in those worlds.

It was with the forces of creativity that the elements responded when they intermingled in the very beginnings of life, and it is the quality that will get us out of the many desperate situations that we find ourselves and our human family tangled up in.  For me, the essence of my spirit is what leads my creative thoughts, and it is my thoughts that lead my actions.  When I hear music, or read words, or look at images, it is the feelings that these moments create in my heart that draw me in or not. When I create music, or go out with my camera, or knit, weave, or spin, dance, sing or think up something for dinner, it is my inner stirrings of spirit that a I look for to lead me.  Some call it the Muse, really it can be called whatever you like.  It is an emotion displayed, a heart string, an expression of the spirit that resides in us all.  We just all use different tools, depending on what calls to us and what we have had the opportunity to practice with.  It’s personal and universal at the same time, whether we share it or not.  I give my deepest thanks to the doors that have opened for me, allowing me to explore the forms of creation that give me full expression about myself and this world we live in.

Release

sunmistI am
grey and brilliant gold,
falling back into the earth
like vapours of exhausted breath.
 
The old patterns emerge
as the lay of the ground comes closer-
the nook and shelter of a trees crook,
a rock in the place where my shoulder
settles in-
habits of comfort and pain.
I am a whole year older
and the rise of the land remains unchanged.
I will push myself up and over 
the slope again,    again,
 
feel the stone on the fibre of my skin
pressing,   pressing,
until I make a shift
 
It is fall and I am falling back,
drifting down, my every cell
dissipates like mist
when the morning warmth
curves away the time.
I fall differently-
I am shifting, in all this-
shifting and turning in mid-air.
It is no use trying to keep
myself together.
 
I settle on fir needles, on spiderwebs,
on the tips of grass blades.
I seep into mushrooms and leaves,
slip through deers’ tongues
and the beaks of chickadees.
 
I will vaporize.
 
I see your eyes as they search
the fog for me-
I land on your lips again and again
 
and I recondense
with a richer understanding
of wholeness.
 
 

Paint Me In

Here again the day
draws up the colour,
sucks it in deep like
sap, sticky and pungently sweet,
splashing the green
against the blue
with great licks and sweeps,
dotted with pebbles of yellow
bounding birds flashing
their orange song,
little beaks streak between
the rust brown pillars
of shadowed patterns,
where breezes tease the branches
to dance
in their lacy needle skirts
 
Here again the day
dissolves the untruths
of separation,
allows the seep and smear
of tone and hue
to bleed
 
I step into this
collage, offering the
bloodsap of my body
to the frameless creation
 
Here again, with each day,
I am glued to the
vivid presence of the artist
 
capturing light with water,
composing the graceful archs
with soil and stone
and flora,
the endless possibilities of clouds
on horizons
 
paint me in-
infuse me with the palette
of this day
 
                 -Wendi Lopatecki
 
 
 

Glass Circle Star

Stained glass window by Tracy Calvert

Glass Circle Star

Circle star

you hold me intact

through the blazing of colours-

of heart and throat,

of cooling blue and the

pangs of crimson

a sweeping tone of

shadowed orange

presses against my temples

and pulls me into the

outward dance,

blueness like sky

blends into expression,

dissolves the time chaser out

from under my feet

shades and hues

shifting, blurring

over lapping into the ripple

and warp-

this is the passing through of colours.

White circle star,

bringing me back in,

horizon clear,

valley shaped, and still being so,

by the sliding-by of the lake

into the river

sky orbited by the pure lure

of magnetism and evolution-

I am swept into your landscape

and then I am swept away

at these imaginings,

of the brilliance

of where these roads might take me if I let them,

this vast, jewelled path

gleams, glimmers,

glistens,

as long as I am listening.

I fall into this submission

of colour,

sink myself in-

and from the other side,

the light

lights my way through.

Tracy and I created this collaborative combination of poetry and art for a Verse and Vision art show that was organized by my mother Margaret here on Pender Island this summer.  She was inspired by listening to the readings by Pender writers at Speak Easy, an open mic night held once a month, and she began encouraging pairs of artists and writers to collaborate and create a show celebrating the word and the image.  Tracy and I have been working together through natural building for the past few years, and it was wonderful to expand into our other passions and connect on a deeper level that explored the process of our creativity and how that place of creating becomes a timeless meditation within a world of shape, colour, patterns, and unplanned, intuitive journeys that teach us about stepping aside and allowing ourselves to be moved without structure or judgement.  Tracy and her partner Jude have a beautiful little cottage that can be rented on South Pender.  Information for the cottage as well as natural building and stained glass creations can be found here…  www.woodandglass.ca

I Remain I

It seems that
    even the clouds
 are in
   on the boisterous song
     of the day-
 
giving their whole beings over
  to the lift and push
     of the winds’
        chorus
 
How can they not?
 
they are the vapour
  of words,
 translated whispers-
    they are visual crescendos
      cascading, shifting
 
They are the song,
             then
   it passes on
and the clouds
     remain clouds,
 
just as I
     remain I
even after the
    boisterous and complex
 song of the day
     blows through.
 
                      Wendi Lopatecki

Guatemalan Rain

I am shaping my mouth
around voices that journeyed
over oceans and mountains,
I am crossing vowels as if they are
rivers of water language,
picking up sounds as subtle as
pushed sand
beneath the oar of my tongue.
I am aware of time,
how it spreads itself thin across
the belly of my travels,
leaving only stretch marks
for untranslatable pauses
that fall
into the silent smiles
of the old woman smiling back at me
 
she turtles herself under a plastic sheet
in the rain,
the barefoot path juggles her
like hopscotch over warm puddles.
In her brown skin there are
landscapes
of stories, bordered by thick ropes of
grey hair.
 
Muchas lluvia,
she says,  lluvia,
singing each syllable as if
every tropical drop were a memory of relief,
her calloused hands open like hibiscus blooms,
banana leaves take hold
of her aroma
 
she moves through the courtyard
as if the trees were her shelter
and she were a field
drinking
in green
 
The faded weaves that wrap her
take her now back into the mountains,
the night tucking her away
 
and I am left beneath the courtyard trees,
my flowering hands
falling.
 

Sea sky

Sea shaded,
  earth mated,
pools of sky left behind by the tide-
  layers of stones
brushed by the combs of waves
  in their great grace,
continuing a rhythm of ageless
  syncronicity 
 
I am naked, I am
  eating my bread in a bed
of opal brown kelp,
  where anemones sway pinkgreen softness,
and muscles breathe their slow blue breath
  at the salt of my skin,
    at the place I have been for so long,
eroding away those things
   I need to be free of.
Sanding me down to the basics again-
  bones and blood
and my fingers to touch all
  of you-
 
I am sea shaded, I am
  earth mated
 
following the will of the way
  of the waters,
trying, in this body,
  to be absolutely
 
                 nothing
 
but a tiny piece of the sky
within the vast expanse.
 
                        
                                  Wendi Lopatecki
 

Rivers of Dreams

Quietly, we ease ourselves
into new waters
catching carefully the moment when
surfaces merge,
and the mingling of words turn streams
into rivers of dreams
 
light plays – reflected in pooled eyes
moon          soft morning         fading day
a continuous gaze painting change,
dew       fog       rain
within our secret, solid element
of body, of deepening insight and acceptance
 
The river pulls, we are sending ourselves
towards the strong path
where love, in its fluid form,
reaches our faith around obstacles,
teaches us unity,
and begins the flowing journey
through lands of offered hands.
 
                                  Wendi Lopatecki
 
 
 

Balance

Balance
in the light
in the wood
I stood-
seeping like moss
reaching like cedars
unfurling and arching
like the jewelled, dewey crowns
of ferns.
 
Moist air exchanges through
my skin, my lungs-
in my breath the flowing streams
connect and cross and
purify
this moment,
solidify
this pillar tree trunk moment
 
 
here between footsteps-
 
I am taken and freed
dying and born
opening and closing
silent and resounding
balancing the ever-changing
constant-growing
ebb and flowing
dance.
 
                                Wendi Lopatecki

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