Feeding the Creative Fire

Creative block, lost mojo, wandering muse. How many ways can we describe those periods when we feel creatively bankrupt and unmotivated? These seem to be common points of discussion amongst artistic types, especially those trying to earn a living with their art work.

So, how to best feed and nurture the muse? Quite by happenstance I tried feeding mine in a very new and different way at the start of this year. Two of my friends have have been studying Peruvian shamanism and and decided to host a despacho on New Years day, and I was invited to attend. A despacho is, in essence, a ceremony where you put together a package, an offering, both physical and full of thoughts and intentions, and then burn it offering it to the spirits. For more details about this and pictures too, I will direct you to my personal blog where I wrote more extensively about this.

So where do beads and my creativity get involved? At that start of the evening my hosts explained the ceremony and told me I could add any thing to the offering that I deemed worth while… since I live right across the street it was easy for me to go grab a few items, and of course the first thing that came to mind was beads. So I rummaged through my stash and chose the following:

1. A broken bead, because I really need fix the parts of me that feel broken due to my recent divorce

2. A couple of my floral beads, because I really want my garden to grow lush and beautiful. Both the garden in my yard and my creative garden.

3. One of my weird, experimental beads. I like to make bead that are different, and while I often like them, many never sell which make me sometimes wonder if I’m wasting my time trying to be to creative… maybe I should let the spirits tell me.

4. An assortment of glass rod pieces, in rainbow colors. Is there a better way to start a new year than with a rainbow?

At what seemed to be the appropriate time during the ceremony I added my beads to the package. Broken bead to the earth layer, florals to the plant layer, experimental bead to the animal layer and strangely enough I kept my rainbow in my pocket until the end, and the last layer just happened to by the sky and heavens layer. How cool is that!

As we burned the despacho we all peered into the fire trying to see the fate of the objects as they burned. We often caught glimpses of color, presumably my glass beads. I wondered how me, which were born in the flame, would fare during their end in the flame. As it turns out shaman often sift though the ashes to see what remains of the despacho, so the next day I got most of my beads back.

They fared better than expected. The broken bead,was still broken of course, but still recognizable. My encased floral has shattered and partially reassembled itself, my other floral warped, as did the rods. Interestingly, my weird experimental bead, was nearly unscathed. A bit charred on one side but otherwise intact.

So what does this mean? Who really knows! (and I admit I’m not really much of a “believer” anyway!) But I’ll take the survival of my weird bead to mean that I should continue indulging my weird experimental side! Were the spirits pleased with my offerings? I’ve been pretty happy with my new beads for or the new year, so maybe they were! Whether they were or weren’t and whether your a believer or not, it was an interesting way to start my new creative year!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!