Poetry, Continuum, & Creativity

Art makes a bridge, from the inner world of soulful truth to the outer world of social engagement and cultural expectations.

I wrote my first poem at age 11, a pre-teen in the 1960’s, grappling with oncoming tides of physical change. Through adolescence, my struggle for a meaningful life found expression in the process of writing.

Poetry was a portal to the otherwise inaccessible, inexpressible reality of my inner life. Through that portal, I entered into spiritual life. Poetry and prayer became synonymous.

When I walked into my first Continuum workshop with Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper, in 1978 at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, the separate inner and outer worlds I had tried to connect through my poems suddenly became seamlessly congruent.

All my distinctions between “inner” and “outer” began to dissolve. Continuum gave me a way - a direct, rich way - to hone and embellish the sense that I was living in an interface connecting my inner, creative world to my daily life as a householder, raising a daughter in a spiritual community.

My apprenticeship with Emilie, including time spent in workshops and retreats and on extended visits to her home in Woodland Hills, California, served to deepen this creative flow.

During my decade or so of traveling with Emilie in the 1980’s, I was struck by how fluently she navigated the swirl of creativity that was always around her, not only as we walked together in the streets of Manhattan, but also and most importantly, in the full scope of the experience of living in and with the movement of the human organism.

Her fully-alive engagement with each person she encountered, from the taxi driver to the students attending her workshops, was so stunningly rich that it took my breath away every time. How did she do it?By what profound insight was she guided? One day, during a workshop at Mount Madonna, California she revealed her secret:

“All the great art, the masterpieces of the ages, the paintings of Rembrandt, Monet and Renoir, the greatest symphonies of Bach and Beethoven, are like droppings in the desert when compared to the artistry of the human body.” -Emilie Conrad, Mount Madonna Workshop, January 16, 1987

At that moment, after my years of trying to bridge the worlds, writing songs, crafting poems, composing dances and improvising pieces at the college level, this was indeed disturbing news. And yet, here was direct access to a depth of creativity I had not touched. I had delved into Emilie?s world and the practice of Continuum, and what was emerging, through my own experience, was a seamlessness between inner and outer: it was a way of living as art, an understanding of the creative process as a biological process and vice versa, the biological process as a creative one.

Now, when I do my morning meditation and movement practice, I often touch something in myself so primal, so viscerally true, that there is no effort or interference in its movement toward expression, which comes, for me, most often as a poem.

Here is an excerpt from the poem “Silent Night”, which I wrote after a practice session in 2005:

“In the black fullness of the night sky

deep silence holds me, wrapping my terror and aloneness,

comforting the despair for worlds town and shattered.

It is thick and substantial and fully felt.

Slowly, very slowly, the morning light begins to soak through the darkness,

like white ink being absorbed by black paper,

dissolving fear, radiating into my bones,

leaving a quiet mystery in its place.”

This process, movement flowing into the creation of art, then folds back on itself, giving me instructions on how to move through life.

So the artistic process becomes a teaching for the movement process and vice versa.

Going into my next dive, I may ask, “Where can I sense this dissolving, radiating quality of which the poem spoke"?” I find it: Ahhh... at the end of the exhalation.

There, in the pause between the breaths, I am compelled by interest, wrapped in curiosity, as my entire organism engages in preparation for the next incoming breath. Radical Hope.

In my practice of Continuum, I can access the organismic experience of the wholeness of life and art as interpenetrating waves, creating a continuous reality between the inner and outer realms of experience.

Emilie conveyed this, simply through how she was, in the world. In the years since Emilie?s passing, I am grateful to Elaine Colandrea for picking up this truth, giving it a place to land and fleshing it out, into Watermark Arts. Those of us honored to be included in the galleries here work in the deep waters of bio-creativity.

May our endeavors beckon to others in the wider sea of life on earth, inspiring them to live a creative life from the inside out.