water and lunar things in terms of creativity

“…the moon is also the ‘Aqua Mirifica’ that extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul.” Jung Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 14

Lake Ontario is one of my earliest muses. As a child I would imagine mermaids and try and coerce my friends to believe in them with me. H and I would stand by the shore in the wilder weather as the huge rocks or the pier would be smashed against by electric waves. We imagined being a part of that greater elemental mystery. I remember that we would often walk away singing.

 I wrote my first inspired poem as I swam in a lake. I had to swim to shore quickly to write it down. My mother was sitting on the beach and I scrambled for a pen and paper. She reached into her purse and handed me her trusty journal and I wrote some bizarre thing or other, but the point is, lying on my back in the middle of a black-bottomed lake, I felt the muses pulling urgently for the first time.

I would walk to the lake practically daily over the twenty-four years I was able to in my hometown, Oakville. Like the moon, it was always there for me, it always generated songwriting, lyrics, poetry or essays, even stories. There is something in the spirit of the water that evokes both trust and mystery, the unknown, the vast, the greater than oneself. A collective spirit which answers in hushes, roars, waves, sprays, howls, trickles, ripples, completely non-judging, eyeless, nourishing, connecting ethereally to the blood that is in us.

The moon and I are great friends. The moon pulls me out of myself, essence-wise, words string out like pearls upward just by the light alone. The presence of the face of the moon is like all muses, detached, distant, unattainable, and of the greatest luminous beauty. Distant, but always there, always returning. The moon also doesn’t judge, and will seem to listen as your philosophies increase in depth.

Water is involved in mood swings in the weather. The fog horn on misty days in Oakville was like a soothing repetitive slow lull of comfort, tiny particles in the air submerging us in silent white noise we breathe into us and out. Bright perfect pale clouds on the horizon of the lake stark against July blue skies fire us with motivation and the more cut and dry sensations. Heavy rains and low thunderous growls evoke excitement in our bodies, the electricity and power created by the friction of clouds. I recorded a song once during a thunder storm, I felt the electricity inside, and I am certain that it was actually the storm singing through me because I was never able to recreate that performance.

It can be fun to dissolve oneself in a creative process, be it singing, gazing blank-eyed over a lulling guitar composition, drawing a rhythm of pointillism on a larger paper, feeling things crystallize beyond yourself, an escape from usual everyday consciousness. It is amazing what imagery can crop up beyond one’s control. Relinquishing control over our art is a fantastic practice as well. Once we relinquish that sense of egoistic creation, the real stuff starts to happen. Carl Jung mentioned this before:

“[The creative forces] have you on a string and you dance to their whistling, to their melody. But in as much as you say these creative forces are in Nietzsche or in me or anywhere else, you cause an inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. That is the truth. If he allows himself to be thoroughly possessed by them without questioning, without looking at them, there is no inflation, but the moment he splits off, when he thinks, I am the fellow, an inflation follows… 

It happens automatically that you become conscious of yourself and then you are gone, it is as if you had touched a high tension wire.” - Zarathustra Seminar

It is wonderful to allow that surge, the stream to flow through you as water, being poured through from one body to another invisible, greater sea. There is no need to feel an ego connection to the creation; I find compliments often feel useless and false; but for myself, I deeply enjoy connecting to like minds through this mystical expression, I feel pleased to be a vessel for something beyond, a means of communication for a mystery. There are so many levels of meaning we cannot even know of ourselves until we find our means of spelling or sounding it out. Water makes this easier for some of us.