A River Flows: Creativity, Joy, and Resistance

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

- Rumi 

If you’ve ever pursued a creative project, you may have realized quickly that creation demands a quality of energy beyond the one you draw from in your everyday life. You must seek to be in relationship with a kind of spacious, spiraling, messy, free flowing current of mystery that our culture of linear productivity works to dam. 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls this hidden current “Rio Abajo Rio” — the river beneath the river. It is an ancient, underground stream of consciousness, truth, creativity, and raw instinct that flows beneath ordinary daily life. It is eternal and essential. When this inner current flows freely into us, our creative and emotional lives flow; when it is blocked, our spirit feels stuck and stagnant. 

The creative life does not begin when ordinary life is finally in order. It does not wait until you have completed the degree, raised the baby, secured the job, finished the house project, or reached the destination of “one day.” The Rio Abajo Rio is always flowing beneath and within the fabric of your life. 

Accessing it simply demands receptivity. 

Like a dry river bed receiving rain, it asks that we clear the channel so we can become a conduit of life. We must open ourselves to hearing the call of the muse and follow the paw prints in the dark, stepping out of the realm of logic, analysis, and productivity, and into the land of magic, symbol, and image — listening for the soul of things.

The willingness to embrace this kind of mythic sensibility creates space. It opens a far larger landscape of being and meaning-making than the one we were handed by default. It grants us access to the reservoir of ancient wisdom running below the surface. The mundane becomes mystical. The impossible becomes possible. 

This is a practice, a soulful remembrance that requires devotion. 

A decolonization of the imagination and belief system we absorbed about value, worth, and usefulness. It requires an immense amount of unlearning - an excavation of the most primordial aspects of psyche. 

So what does this practice look like? How do we surrender to the current? How might we dig into these depths, and break the dam of the river to reclaim our wild creative nature that has the potential to birth a new world? 

When times are tough, when the world is full of disaster, upset, and suffering, allowing joy and delighting in beauty can feel out of place, even like a betrayal of the empathy and compassion that the moment demands. 

Hold on, dear ones. 

Joy and beauty are necessary agents in the kind of soul healing the world needs. They are alchemical ingredients that we can catalyze through our creative life in envisioning a better world. 

We will not make it through on heart break and vigilance alone. We need the medicine that lives in the deepest wells of the human soul, the vat that contains both grief and joy, pain and beauty, without contradiction. 

To have great compassion does not mean being constantly rent open by suffering. By all means, let your heart break open. But not how glass breaks, shattering in shards that perpetuate blood loss. Break like bread. 

The work is to create a stable, profound consciousness — one steady enough to bear witness and meet it with careful hands. Joy is the gentle, warm, soothing balm that can carry us through heartbreak after heartbreak. Butter, for the bread. 

Wonder and joyful expression are pathways to ease in the present moment, and they lead us naturally toward gratitude, celebration, and the creation of new possibilities. Genuine, nourishing, generative, play, joy, and beauty, are forces of resistance against oppression. They are necessary for bringing about revolution. 

Contrary to the capitalistic, patriarchal belief of utility and frivolity, we do not need a significant reason to be happy, to celebrate, to create. In fact, we must create for the sake of creation. We must throw our head back and howl with joy as much as we do in pain. We must wander into the woods at midnight and shapeshift into our wildest self, paint with mud on the beige confinement chambers of culture, and laugh in the face of all that tries to leash us.

We need to take on the posture of receptivity, opening ourselves up to the lifegiving waters that will nourish the cracked soil of our souls, feeding the bloom longing to sprout. Closing ourselves off from hurt also closes us off to comfort. Not allowing feelings of grief or pain also restricts feelings of love and happiness. So we might invite reverence into our intention daily, and remember that we are not merely beggars in the spiritual world, but inherently worthy, divine beings with agency and unique and meaningful vision. We might, as Rumi suggests, welcome all guests. 

Creative expression manifests from experience, and in as many ways as there are people. Yes, in what you make with your hands in paint, pen, textiles, images, clay, etc. And, perhaps even more importantly, creativity emerges when you give your heart freedom to express love for what it loves. How you dress your body, decorate a home, sing your prayers, name your sorrows, show up for relationships, how you meet the world in only the way you can. 

This, friends, is the foundation of resistance. 

My teachers in Mexico often call the spirit of the mushroom Los Santos Niños — the holy children. Not only do they possess the necessary alchemical powers of breaking down what no longer serves, at the same time, they invite in something new. As masterful and wise as this medicine is, the spirit of the mushroom is equally playful, childlike, and benevolent, calling forth our sense of wonder and curiosity. They remind us that the work doesn't always have to be a constant struggle. 

In fact, it can't be. 

The river beneath the river, Rio Abajo Rio, is ceaselessly flowing. It is up to us to return to its life-giving waters, again and again, and splash about — drenching the world with our wonder. The world doesn’t need saviors. 

It needs lovers.