Of Bees and a Bucket of Water

I recently remembered an encounter I had with a bee when I was five years old, which resulted in my first inkling that I wanted to be a writer. Like most children growing up in warm climates, I walked around barefoot most of the time. I was mildly allergic to bees, so when I stepped on one, I couldn’t walk due to the pain and swelling. My mum’s remedy was to soak my foot in a bucket of ice cold water.

Photo by sebastien rosset on Unsplash

I still remember the scene – it was in my parents’ bedroom in the home where we lived just before they got divorced. I was feeling confined and rather sorry for myself, hoping the cold water would do its job so I could again move around. I can’t remember feeling much else, but like all children I must have been subconsciously aware of all the emotional undercurrents, the tears that were not being shed and the fears surrounding the end of a chapter. A thought popped into my head that I wanted to write a story about a bucket of water one day. I didn’t know the plot, but the emotional thread had something to do with a little girl who lost her way and found it back home again.

I dismissed the idea as silly almost immediately, but the thought stayed with me for a few more years even though I felt embarrassed at the mere memory. In my immediate reality, the world around me crumbled and was rebuilt as two separate worlds, both of which still formed part of my life. It wasn’t perfect (when is anything ever), but everyone involved got on with their lives and found some sort of resilience.

A few years down the line I was forced to deal with my personal darkness, because my subconscious mind urged me to do so. It is impossible to say how much of my anxiety was linked with wounds from childhood, but the road to better well-being was long, arduous and intermittent.
Although I expected the healing journey to help me return to “normal”, or rather, help turn me into a normal person, it wasn’t the case. Instead, I opened Pandora’s box and a plethora of monsters attacked me, but they eventually turned into allies. I discovered pieces of myself I had forgotten existed, or perhaps had never been aware of. Along with the archetypal realm of vivid, confusing and sometimes terrifying images, I also re-discovered my ability to love, something I felt I had lost. My dreams had been hiding in the same closet as my monsters. Through my fear of unleashing my shadows in the world, I had also been suppressing my gifts.

It may not be obvious what bees and a bucket of water have to do with healing and it wasn’t obvious to my five-year-old self either. But now that I have an understanding of symbols, I think it was the universe’s genius way of showing me something about my path in life. Time and again, whenever I was incapacitated due to physical illness, injury or emotional turmoil, creative expression was my great saviour. Water is symbolic of the unconscious, and through plunging into this realm and turning the archetypal images into stories, the poison in my system lost its potency. Through turning to the healing waters of my soul, also known as tears, my pain gained a purpose.

The incident came to mind again only recently, about three decades later, when I was reading about an encounter with bees of another author whose work I admire. The book is Supernatural and the author is Graham Hancock, who was born in Edinburgh where I currently live and the incident coincidentally happened in South Africa, where I was born. Hancock ventured into the Drakensberg mountains to find and examine ancient rock art. The hypothesis he puts forward in the book is that encounters with supernatural beings inspired the oldest forms of creative expression and indeed brought about the origins of civilisation and religious thought. While he was studying the ancient art, he became aware of a beehive, which was very dangerous considering he had had severe allergic reactions to bee stings in the past. When he was stung, he had no serious reaction, but he remembered that bees had spiritual significance in the mythology of the San people of Southern Africa. To him the experience was meaningful and may have led to insight into the inhabitants of other non-physical realms and our relationship to them.

Hancock’s story encouraged me to again look at the experience of inspiration my bee sting brought about when I was five years old. My journey to mend the wounds in my soul brought me in touch with the wounded healer archetype, a phenomenon that occurs across cultures where healers find their calling through an experience of physical or mental illness. Through plunging into the depths of their soul, they meet helpers in other realms, who assist them in healing others. My efforts to heal certainly opened doors to other realms and led me to learn about shamanic healing. In my case, healing and creativity go hand in hand.

As little as bees are, if the San people had it right, they could be the soul’s messengers even when they are threatening. At such a significant time in my young life, these tiny helpers came to whisper in my ear how I could move beyond pain to claim the power in my soul. When I had all but forgotten about my aspirations, they reminded me, through literature, what my original dreams were.

The universe is teeming with life and intelligence, expressed in the smallest and largest of ways. My story about a bucket of water is maybe not the original one I had in mind, but thirty years later I am writing it to honour the little girl’s dreams. Because regardless of how small and insignificant she felt, and often still does, the universe was in her as much as in everything else. Although she didn’t know it at the time, she was capable of wisdom.

Spider Symbolism: Resistance

Recently when I was feeling very stuck I had some imagery coming to me and I turned it into a poem (loose definition). I then made a drawing to accompany it. The spider and her web were apt symbols because of the association with danger and bondage but also creativity.

I am reminded of the classical myth of Arachne, a female personification of the spider. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a weaving contest between a mortal woman, Arachne, and the goddess of crafts and wisdom, Athena. Not only was Arachne extremely skilful, but she also exposed the crimes of the gods through her weaving. The infuriated goddess turned her into a spider as punishment. As a remnant of her human gift, the spider still spins her web.

Shelob & Me

The mortal and the divine are both present in the story. I would contend that Arachne and Minerva are mirror images of one another. Suppressed creativity can turn into darkness, as symbolised by the lonesome spider. The feeling of oppression, although inconvenient, often would not leave us alone until we claim our creative gifts. My poem is called “The Resistance”.

The Resistance
Like a shadow of the night she comes
Enfolded in darkness
In her hand is a scythe
Gleaming in the moonlight
The door is closed, but she comes in uninvited
Takes a seat on my bed.
I pretend not to be afraid, but my throat constricts.
I ignore her, waiting for the sun to come up.
But time stands still. She is not going anywhere.
She makes me cry.
Why are you holding me back? I hear myself moan.
Why are you making me weak?
The room fades out as her presence turns into a nightmare

A spider she is, and I the moth stuck in her web
The sticky strands clamp wilfully around my wrists.
I try to scream, but my throat is tight
Blue fangs, red eyes
Coming in for the attack
She wants to prey on me, paralyse me
Turn me into an empty shell
Poison moves closer, the end is nigh
Her foul mouth leans in for the kiss
The red eyes connect with mine, become larger
They show me gaunt figures
Lifetimes of suffering
The unloved ones know not how un-alone they truly are
Despairing, they look as trapped as I feel
So many gifts going to waste.
I sympathise with the spider, and surrender
She bites, and my mind is lulled into a soporific sleep
A goddess is holding me, takes me up into the night sky
I sit on the moon and look down on a beautiful creation
A woven tapestry
Magical story created from the self-same strands that held me
This is why I won’t leave you alone, she whispers,
Know yourself.

Creativity and our Connection with the Universal Mind

Creativity is an interesting thing because nobody can really tell another person how to be creative. Many people have told me that they are not creative at all, but I don’t believe them. Some people express their creativity more than others, while many people prefer to think of themselves as analytical thinkers. But all of us have creative imagination as well as the ability to think logically. I think that creativity is intrinsically a part of every human being as much as the capacity to love.

Many people don’t develop their creative faculty, or they lose touch with it because they are not encouraged to use it. Although I have always written poetry and/or kept a journal, I put less effort into it in the time when my office job consumed most of my time and energy. The most useful advice I got to help me actually start writing fiction, something I had dreamed of doing for 14 years before I started, was from reading interviews with established authors like Neil Gaiman and Paulo Coelho. I learned that an author doesn’t need to have everything exactly worked out before starting to write, and that the unconscious is a valuable tool. Having gathered enough courage and filled to the brim with frustration with my circumstances, I started writing without really knowing what I was doing. What emerged was at times unexpected, and it intrigued me.

The creative process is fluid, and reflecting on it I cannot say that I truly know what the relationship between me, the story and the characters is. I used to think that an author invented a story, and for me the idea was a barrier as I felt that it was too difficult to think of something as brilliant as some of the stories I have read. Things changed when I asked for a story, and met the characters in another realm, and asked them to tell me their story. In that way, something sincere started to unfold. Rather than achieving something, I felt that my first novel, In Search of the Golden City, was a journey through which I learned a lot about myself and my personal path. The creative process is all the more spell-binding when I work with it even though I don’t understand it.

Through creativity I feel a connection with the universe, and this brings to mind the mysterious Source of everything we know. The idea of the universe as a creation has been in dispute by mainstream religion and mainstream science, as if our human minds could know the answers to something as profound and impenetrable as universal origins. I have at times felt that talking about “creation” is heretical in the eyes of supporters of the science paradigm, because it presupposes the idea of an intelligent force behind everything. To some people it smacks of religious dogma, and to combat it, they would rather embrace the idea of an accident without purpose. Religious and scientific dogma aside, I do feel that there is a Creative Source that I am sometimes more in touch with than others, and that magic and healing start happening through communion with this Source.

As an artist, when I create something, it doesn’t always come out as planned. What I create has a will of its own, and the process is most powerful when I allow that will to come through me. In that sense, I don’t feel like a creator at all, rather an instrument. Although my characters are sometimes in conflict with one another, they are part of the same story, and they learn from one another since each expresses an aspect of something that is buried within me.

Suppose then, we wove our own stories through the universe as a work of art, what would our relationship with the Creator be? I think that question is as open for interpretation as the one of what my relationship with the characters in the stories I write is. In my opinion, the conventional idea of intelligent design falls short when it advocates a creator that made the universe a long time ago but is essentially separate from it. The idea of accident without purpose doesn’t ring true either. Without pretending to know anything, I could imagine that we are all part of the same dream, and that each person or thing is an aspect of the dream. As we live, we could strive towards creating bright, powerful stories with the full magic of being a facet of a glorious and unfathomable dream. Or we could play a part in a dull story directed by those who deny the spectacular life force, if we believe in their power rather than our own.

Saying Goodbye to the Notion of Work as a Treadmill

We have this thing called work entirely wrong. It’s upside down and it’s no longer working. Working in the way we know it isn’t the law of nature i.e. survival of the fittest, it is the product of our limited resources based consciousness. We strive for endless economic growth and in the process we have created a system that benefits a few while the rest of the world has to suffer. We assume it has to be this way and nobody really asks how we got here in the first place. The more comfortable we are, the less inclined we are to question and yet somewhere, deep down, we know that something is wrong. It is time for transformation because the system we have created is collapsing.

An unexpected thread recently presented itself in the course of my conversations with people, mostly through work. In the job that I have left very recently, I tried to help people in their business wherever I could. Yet at some point during some conversations with clients I became tempted to switch off my business persona and listen to them as people – meaning REALLY listen, understand their challenges and commiserate where appropriate. This often involved acknowledging that I didn’t have all the answers and in that way exposing myself, risking looking like an idiot. The interesting thing was that occasionally the roles were reversed and the client would listen to me as a person and advise me on how to handle my approaching life changes (involving leaving my country). The common theme that emerged was that people are tired of being on a treadmill. They have to work more and more for less and less money and they start asking themselves what the point is.

My mother used to tell me that money makes the world go round. This is such a profoundly untrue statement and yet it’s the belief that society is based on. The world goes round of its own accord and life renews itself without our interference. If anything, we just destroy what is given to us for free in favour of making space for things we can make money of. Looking at the way society functions, we have to have money to get by and yet if we take arbitrary things out of the equation then I wonder how much we really need. Civilisation didn’t get there all by itself and yet I wonder what the money and the work that made it all happen is based on. It’s not even the same in every country. I was taught that if you work hard it will pay off. Yet when I started working in “the system” I realised how far from accurate this statement is. If we understand the original idea behind work from an existential and cosmic perspective better then I think we might come closer to the truth.

I’ve never been a fan of laziness  and yet looking around me at all the things that “money” produce I think it’s based on symbols, belief and magic more than hard work, necessity and survival of the fittest. When I was younger and having trouble getting through a school day I would occasionally have anxiety about “surviving” when I grew up. I was afraid that I might at some point just become too tired to work in the same way that I was too bored/tired at school to listen in class and do my homework like I was supposed to. I remember being told once that I should enjoy being a child because once you grow up you are no longer carefree but weighed down by responsibilities. On the one hand I thought that it was impossible because being a grown up meant that you could do whatever you wanted to. On the other hand I didn’t enjoy much being a child and was wondering how much worse it could get once I grew up. It also makes me ask the question, if life sucks so much and the treadmill is a fact of life then why is it another “fact of life” that we have to perpetuate the cycle by bringing new life into the world? The “normal” course of life is to “grow up” in the way your parents see fit so you could also be a responsible individual one day – one who would earn enough money to provide for the family (if you’re a man) or always sacrifice your own desires for everyone else (if you’re a woman). This is to protect the children that you would raise so they could be responsible, bored and miserable individuals like yourself one day. Once you’re thirty, you have to be settled, rich and have a family or you’re a misfit at best, a drifter at worst.

I recognise the tiredness that I dreaded as child in others and even when it’s my job to tell clients that they “should” be putting in more effort, I would rather sympathise. The dreamer in me wants to know what society would be like if everyone thought differently about work. Perhaps in the world that we live in now, work is a means to “get by”; a necessity rather than a choice. Yet when you want to apply for a job, potential employers expect you to be “enthusiastic”, “driven”, “passionate” etc. like you’d work on their objectives for the love of it rather than because you need the money.

We misunderstand work. The new age spiritual teachers would tell you that “thought is creative” and yet people often forget about the importance of action. Work is the action that provides the fuel to our thoughts. I don’t think there is any more powerful way to create ourselves and society than through what we put into our work. In a purely material sense it means that if you do certain work you would get a certain something in return, based on the parameters that have already been established. In a more direct sense, work is much more than that. It is our means of bringing ourselves into the world and it is possibly the most potent tool we have of collectively creating the world.

Work as I like to believe it was originally intended is about love and authenticity. It is why we exist and how we create meaning in life. It is our answer to life’s most important question – who are you? The answer might not lie in the fixed label of an invented profession, but in defining ourselves through our actions in response to life’s challenges. It is also the way in which we reinforce our beliefs about ourselves and the world to our subconscious mind. If we believe that we will never have enough and have to suffer in order to gain recognition and that is the way in which we work then we will always be on a treadmill. If we believe that we have a gift to bring and that the world can benefit from it then we might succeed in bringing more light to our surroundings. Work is about the pleasure of creating what we would like to see in the world.

The Power of Music and Our Lives as Songs

Music has an interesting effect on me. When I listen to (good) music whilst training, I train much harder with less effort. I don’t feel any more tired afterwards and I’m in an even greater mood the rest of the day than through exercise alone. I like to imagine that my good mood is contagious and that the people around me also benefit from my elevated energy levels. I am convinced that no anti-depressant can be even half as potent as the combination of good exercise and good music.

The effects of dancing to good music are even more powerful. When I feel music in my bones, I let it take over my entire being. I lose track of the different notes and the lyrics become irrelevant. Even the theme of the song disappears as I am possessed by the passion where it springs from. Depending on the energy of the song, I am transported to another landscape, the one where dreams are born. Allowing this rhythm to infuse my being, I am connected to the stars whilst feeling the energy of Mother Earth rising up through my feet. I don’t even know what my body is doing as I merge with the core of some passionate idea that came into existence as a song. My batteries are charged and afterwards I often find my head buzzing with ideas urging me to express them. When I come out of my trance, I feel spaced out and would wonder who on earth needs drugs when you can get high as a kite on dancing, without the side effects.

I don’t know many people who don’t love some form of music and yet I’m not sure we realise what a potent and important tool it is. Those who banned it (with dancing) in certain countries and eras must have realised its power. I often think that the value of art isn’t fully appreciated in the culture I live in. Art is a nice to have rather than a necessity – the necessities are mostly limited to getting bread on the table and remaining stuck in our treadmill lifestyle. The true artists understand on a deeper level that music is more than a few notes stringed together or a product of the intellect. It is an expression of the soul. The more sincere the art is and the deeper the place that it comes from, the greater is its power to stir something in someone else, waking them up to their deepest desires also. It connects us to the fabric of which life is woven, asking us to remember what we would like to bring into the world. The power of music is to inspire in us dreams of the world we would like to see so we in turn may influence rather than for ever reacting to what has already been established.

Creating art is an interesting process because there is some ambiguity about how the art came into being. On the one hand, the artist seems to be the creator. On the other, the artist is merely the channel through which ideas express themselves. The best art comes from a place beyond the mind, pushing itself into being through the artist as vessel. In that sense, the idea chooses the artist and will badger him in some way or another until he shares the light with the world.

I could think in the same way of us being dreams in the mind of Creator. Looking at it that way, music teaches us something about our lives. If we want to be truly creative and live from the place where good music comes from, we have to find the songs of our souls. It’s not something we have to invent: the songs of our souls are there, waiting for us to sing them. To make the effect even more potent, we have to dance them into the world, translated as bringing our light into the world through action. I don’t think what we busy ourselves with is even that important. What is more important is that we are connected to the flow whilst acting, because that is how we will transform our reality.

Living life from the place where good music is born can free us of the necessity to always have to get somewhere or obtain something. Bringing our song to the moment we are in is a good place to start creating a lighter, freer world.

The Art of Being Original

Being an artist means one has to expose oneself. The energy of creativity will only have power when the artist creates from deep within his soul. She has to put a little bit of herself into her work in order to truly reach others. Art is appreciated and understood from a level beyond the mind. When an artist sincerely expresses himself, his art will inspire others to sing their own unique songs. It is the artist’s intention to create and his willingness to be open that make the dream world accessible, both for himself and his audience.

The artist’s biggest obstacle is the fear of exposing himself. It is much easier to find a way around his yearning to create by lying to his soul. He could tell himself that it is impossible to make a living as an artist, or that he could never be as good as other artists. He could make excuses, saying that it is too late to start or that he doesn’t have time.

Failing at something we don’t care about doesn’t really hurt. It is therefore much easier than failing at the only thing that we value with our entire being. This is what prevents the artist from cultivating his talent and trying to succeed at his true craft. It makes no sense, yet the artist tells himself that it is easier to cultivate a skill that doesn’t come naturally to him.

In the end it is frustration that frees the artist. The soul is clever and it knows that the artist will feel it when his soul is dying. It will refuse to accept his dispassion, for it knows that the true artist cannot handle numbness. She desires experience and is willing to endure pain in order to feel alive. The soul will not play along with indifference, for it knows that the artist wants to break free. She will eventually return to claiming her true identity and embrace the pain that goes hand in hand with creativity.

It is only through exposing oneself that true originality is born. Fear of rejection or failure is the artist’s greatest obstacle, and yet vulnerability is his greatest strength. When an artist is truly himself, he has the best chance of being great, because only then does he become all that he was born to be.