Real Words

Anyone who reads this blog regularly - or semi-regularly - probably knows that I am a big fan of what I call “creative reading”. By this, I mean reading those books which are specifically designed to draw the reader’s attention to the act of being creative. In many cases, these books are designed specifically for writers and use writing prompts as a way to encourage creative writing.

However, in other cases, the books are designed just to encourage the reader to be more creative in his or her art (such as with Julia Cameron’s The Complete Artist’s Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice). And in some cases, the book is designed to simply encourage more creative living in daily life (like with Living Artfully: Create the Life You Imagine by Sandra Magsamen).

The book that I am reading now - What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul by Oriah Mountain Dreamer - does a little bit of all of these creative things. It is designed to encourage the reader to consider the melding of three different aspects of life - sexuality, spirituality and creativity - in order to live more completely. At it’s core, that’s about living all of life more creatively. However, it focuses specifically on the act of writing when making a lot of its points and uses writing prompts at the end of chapter to emphasize this. And yet, these writing prompts can be easily adapted to other types of art so that it applies to the artistic life in general.

There are a lot of things that I’m enjoying about this particular creative reading book. For example, the writing prompts at the end of each chapter are really helping me to think about what I’m reading and to integrate it into my work. And there aren’t just writing prompts here. There are some questions that are posed just for contemplation - questions that can be focused on or that can be tucked away into the back of the mind to guide the day’s thinking. These end pages of each chapter serve to reinforce what was described in the chapter itself as well as to allow the reader to go even further with the work.

When it boils down to it, though, the real reason that I love this book is because I agree with its core foundation. It is based on the idea that we can not be completely happy unless we are able to fully realize ourselves as sexual, spiritual and creative people. Those are rigid terms but they imply looser concepts. They say that we need to be able to experience our own senses in the world, to feel that we are interconnected with something bigger than ourselves and to use our perceptions to create something outside of ourselves. When these three aspects of life are in balance, we can be content. I believe in that idea and therefore this is an easy book to like.

Question of the Day: Do you believe that any one of those three aspects - sensuality, spirituality or creativity - is more or less important to your writing than the others?

[Tags] oriah mountain dreamer, writing, reading, books, creativity, sensuality, sexuality, spirituality [/Tags]