In January I bought and read a new book, ‘The House that Joy Built, the pleasure & power of giving ourselves permission to create.’ written by Holly Ringland.
The beginning of the year is a good time to start fresh and find new ways of doing things, new resolutions etc. Reading the book was cathartic. On a par with how much reading ‘The Artist Way’ by Julia Cameron, affected me in 2017. I took notes as I read Holly’s book. I wanted to make sure I didn’t rush through it or miss anything. Some of the notes make me laugh. Like this one:
‘T.U.M.’ see page 48
I’m not going to tell you what it means, I reckon you need to read the book to find out.
Holly describes our inner creative self as our inner country. This rang like a bell down through the ages. It worked its way down into my very being and into my soul. All my ancestors, long dead and gone, the bards, the musicians and the poets who lived up in the singing mountains and in the valleys of Wales sat up and took note. More than that, they cheered and whistled and applauded. Some of my ancestors had lived in Australia, for a few years, in the 1800’s before going back to Wales. Australia and Wales. I am from both.
When I travelled to Wales for a visit in 2019, we drove over the Severn Bridge from England to Wales and I felt a visceral connection the land and the sea before me. I wept when I saw the coastline and the green, green grass of Wales. A deep longing, I’d been feeling since I was a child, was met and I felt the peace of that moment wash over me and welcome me home.
I hold onto that feeling now as I write this blog and consider my inner country. The place within me where creativity lives. It’s a fragile place at the moment, in need of much love and patience. Writing this piece is an act of love to my inner country. I am turning up and seeing what spills onto the page.
Holly says in her book,’The way we come back to ourselves, come back to our creativity, is a tool we already possess in our minds: the ability to be present.’
I gave myself a sabbatical this June. No pressure to create, perform, respond, engage…
May was an uncomfortable, hectic time filled with raw unstable emotions. Which is quite normal when your parent dies. In my family, mother, father, brothers, sister – I’m the peacekeeper, the understanding one, the tolerant one who carefully negotiates and helps everyone else deal with their uncomfortable emotions. The Empath. Not this time. With nothing in the tank, I chose not to respond to other people’s raw negative emotions, and there was a truck load being dumped in my lap almost daily. Instead of defending myself or retaliating, I retreated and gave myself time off. I decided to disconnect from the needs of everyone around me and go into preservation mode. Like a computer shutting down to repair itself, I hit cntrl/alt/delete.
It’s July tomorrow and that marks the end of my self imposed sabbatical. When I thought about doing anything even remotely creative, I struggled to find myself in the fog. I thought reminding myself of my core values might help clear my thinking. My core values express the ‘who I am-ness’ of me. The bedrock of my inner country. I remembered ‘Connection’ and ‘Creativity’ but the third one eluded me. I wondered how I could have forgotten it. Curious to see what I had written in my journal in January, I found the page where I’d written my core values. It made me laugh.
Curiosity was the third value. Someone once said ‘curiosity is the birthplace of creativity’ and they were right.
Having reminded myself of my need to be connected to other human beings and to the world around me and to feed and nurture my inner creativity, my inner country, and to allow myself to be curious about how I was feeling about it all, I picked up my paints and created something. I painted a picture for a friend’s birthday. It took several attempts as I was a little rusty.
Then I decided to reconnect with people online. I opened ‘Substack’ and was surprised to see a note from Holly Ringland. It reminded me about the importance of turning up. Her words inspired me to write a short note to send my thoughts out into the universe as a way of saying, ‘I am here, I’m turning up.’ When Holly commented on my note it blew me away. I felt connected! How weird is it when the very thing we are thinking about or going through just pops up on our feed. It’s almost like there’s a divine presence running through the universe :0)
Remembering my core values reminds me of my ‘Who I am-ness’ and I instantly find myself walking in the green grass of my inner country, whether in the hills of Wales or the hills of Wurundjeri country.
I’m curious to know what your core values are and I wonder what your inner country looks like? Whatever your inner country looks like, may you take time to nurture it today.
Thank you for reading.
Rhiannon Dowding - Writer 