Fingerpainting on the Moon Writing and Creativity As a Path to Freedom

STARTING IN SILENCE When I was very young I would ask my mother to tell me stories about her own childhood. More often than not, I would already be in bed with the lights turned out and the warmth of my mother beside me filling the room. I loved to imagine her life, to hear her say the simple phrases that brought before my eyes the mythic landscape of what came before me. I loved to hear about the trolley car, the ice man, the milk buckets. It made me laugh against all reason to imagine my mother as a young girl shoveling coal, but it frightened me to picture her standing alone in a dark tenement hallway where she washed dishes at the sink that five families shared. Each of the phrases she used called deeply to my imagination and took on the power of a constellation in the sky of my childhood dreams. Milk bucket stood beside ice man. Trolley car was coming to take him home. And I was there, too, with my mother at my side, taking in the nighttime mystery of where I came from and what the world was like before I was born. One part of this ritual that I most remember was my mother's silence. Before she spoke, she would always sit quietly for a few moments on the edge of my bed. I could hear in the dark the slightest trace of her breathing. There was something special about this, something almost prayerful in the way she returned to her own beginnings and allowed the images she would speak to fill her eyes and imagination. I could feel her do this, and it made the silence in the room feel almost holy. It was a silence filled with a curious kind of yearning. A silence made of memory, of wonder, and because she always told me true stories, it was also a silence made of pain. Life is big, it told me. Very big. This is something you will come to understand. And then she would begin to speak. People have always sought the story of their beginning. It is a primordial yearning at the root of all creation myths. As individuals and cultures we have been fascinated with the nature of how we and the world came to be. It is a primary source of our expressive arts. Once our intuition finds its way into form, we begin the naming by which we place ourselves among all other things in the world, what native people of the First Nation call all my relations. Our creations provide a sense of order and meaning that assures us and those who see our work that we do not face our lives alone. What I was able to feel in my mother's silence is true. Life is big. It is bigger than we fully understand. This is part of why we seek to hear and tell stories that take us to our source. We yearn for the intimacy of being wrapped in the sacred shawl such stories provide. And no matter what part of the world, or what tradition, the story comes from, we can tell when it is true. One story of the beginning of the universe that I have always loved comes from mystical Judaic sources. It says that as you stand beneath a midnight sky and gaze into the heavens, each of the countless stars above you and the entire dark fabric of night in this never-ending shimmer dance of black and white before your eyes carries within it a spark of the original Creator. It tells us that at the beginning of creation itself, a lit ember of the Divine was sewn like a stitch into every element that makes up this quilt of night and stars. As you stand in the presence of this illuminated sky that is at once familiar and mysterious, it is very easy to believe this is so. But the story does not stop there. The tradition holds that this ember, this creative spark of the Divine, is not reserved solely for the marvels seen in the heavens at night--the spinning planets, the shooting stars; all things of the universe, including ourselves, are vessels that carry the creative spark. The hidden stitch of light sewn into the fabric of all life is part of who and what we are. This teaching of the universality of creative sparks implies that whether we are answeringLevitt, Peter is the author of 'Fingerpainting on the Moon Writing and Creativity As a Path to Freedom', published 2003 under ISBN 9780609610480 and ISBN 0609610481.