What I am Reading
I recently interviewed Expressive Arts Therapist Marilyn Hagar author of Finding the Wild Inside for my Creative Process Portal.
I asked Marilyn: "How is your creative process presently supporting you to grow, change and transform?"
Marilyn shares: "In her book, Centering, the potter M.C. Richards wrote, “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.” When I was younger, I loved this quote, but it was an idea, rather than something I knew how to live. Back then, the creative process was something outside of me. I am now 73 years old and I no longer see it that way.
All these years of staring at a blank sheet of paper and asking what colors and images might want to appear, being with my piano in the silence and waiting for what sounds might want to be heard, and sitting at my computer, asking what words want to fall on the page, have been a practice of surrendering to something larger than my little ego. When we practice in this way over a lifetime, we are training ourselves to listen and be moved by something deep inside of us. This kind of inquiry has become the way I live my life.
Over the last seven years, I have been focused on writing. I wanted to gather the harvest of what I’ve learned about my creative essence from the time I was a tiny child until now. Though I didn’t know it was a book when I started, I soon realized that it was and Finding the Wild Inside was born. It is the story of how my attention to my inner world, my explorations in music and the arts, my curiosity about my dreams, and my commitment to follow my intuition has made M.C. Richard’s quote a true statement about my life."
Read More in the Creative Process Portal
Today’s world urges us to look outward for life’s meaning and purpose―but our inner lives are the true source of the deeper knowing that gives life meaning. In Finding the Wild Inside, Marilyn Hagar encourages readers to discover that creative place inside us that knows there is more to life than we are currently living―the less rational part of ourselves that she calls our “wild inside,” a place most of us have not been taught to navigate.
View the Book HERE
