Saturday, October 28, 2023

What's So Rewarding About Being Creative?

Selfie with the snow, January 2023, Los Angeles National Forest

I recently wrote answers to a set of questions for a Canvas Rebel Interview, posted in October 2023.  Here's the answer to one question. The rest can be found on their website:

https://canvasrebel.com/meet-maja-trochimczyk/

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

My small publishing house, Moonrise Press, is an outgrowth of my own creative activities. I did not think of myself as a poet or photographer, when still living in Poland, I was a listener, an audience member, a scholar… Then, after moving to America, after losing the ground under my feet, my native culture, language, land, family, friends – I had to re-create myself to survive, So the first benefit of being a poet was creating and asserting my own identity as “me” through my art. Finally, I was not writing about what others thought and did, I was writing about what I felt, what I thought. 

While this “poetry as self-expression” is at the root of so many bad books, so many failed artistic efforts, it is also healing, it is also empowering. It gives you the strength to survive and go on. These aspects of creativity should never be discounted or ignored… Artistic criteria and “taste” change in time, evolve with shifting fashions – but being true to yourself in your words, expressing the deepest emotions and the most personal thoughts will never go out of fashion! 

The joy of being creative is in the very act of creation. Someone said that when creating we become truly Divine, we are the Divine co-creators of this beautiful world. Therefore, we are responsible for the worlds we conjure up with our words and images. Are these worlds dystopian, hideous? Are these worlds full of light, joy, laughter, beauty?

Cloudscape on the Way to Chicago, October 2023

When I was studying music history, I was told to never write about “beauty” in music, only about “know-how” of compositional techniques and the mechanism of the artwork taken apart in analysis like a clockwork… I never fully agreed with that, so in my own poetry and photography I happily capture and share with others what I find beautiful, inspirational, good, true…

 I still believe in Platonian trinity of beauty=goodness=truth. Also in the Three L trinity of Life=Love=Light. Creating beauty, building new, fantastic worlds – what could be better than that? Self-expression is good, but my advice to poets is borrowed from Clancy Imislund of the Midnight Mission (where I worked on grant proposals for a while): “Absolutely No Whining!”

A Way Not to Be - A Chemtrail Landscape, Sunland, October 2023

The photo above is something to "whine" about - chemtrails, made deliberately by planes in the past, drones or planes more recently. What for? Who knows? Dimming to sun because of, gasp, OMG, climate change"?  Or increasing the amount of metal nanoparticles in the atmosphere and organic matter to make it all more visible to the machines? Or changing the weather, so we get rain or no rain, drought or floods, depending on the "weather-controllers"' whimsy? There are plenty of patents and plenty of proof worldwide. But no "official" acknowledgement. Event a White House petition I signed many years ago failed to reach 10,000 signatures. ... Oh, well, what can I do? 

Instead, let's read two different "whining" poems just for fun; since the time of the great contradiction comes, the time that somehow impresses shopkeepers and shoppers so much they want to recreate cemeteries and skeletons to scare us at Halloween. Another reason to go on a shopping spree and buy imitations of severed hands and bloody eyeballs. Sick. 

But what if we are not afraid of death at all? What if all we want is to celebrate life? In the material world death is inevitable and necessary; otherwise there would be not enough room for all of us. Imagine living along with all the dinosaurs that ever lived, in forests forever full of gigantic mushrooms and ferns... trying to run away from pterodactyls, and the dreaded T-rex teeth... 

Well, it is much better to live, make the best of this life, make all the right choices, create and share joy and learn the most important lessons, primarily of gratitude, wonder, love... Sometimes these lessons are very tricky, too tricky... We do not even pay attention when too busy with our gadgets: Roku, Xumo, X-Box, iPhone... They capture our attention, suck us into a black hole of absence from reality. So we do not look up, do not see the striped skies of chemtrails, do not pay attention to the birds flying by...

Take, for instance, the crow, a "failed primadonna" and an enemy of my beloved songbirds. How happy I was when watching a mockingbird couple take upon four crows that tried to get into the bushes to eat their babies. Their heroism dedicated to protecting their children knew no bounds.  It is easy to protect your children when you are a mockingbird fighting with crows. It is much harder when surrounded by so much propaganda with so many institutions trying to take away your parental rights. Maybe it is time to exit all these institutions, move somewhere to a homestead in the middle of nowhere, to raise children close to nature, in peace.... 

Cloudscape II. The Way to Chicago

No, there are no crows here, I dislike them so sincerely I never take photos of them.


What Do I Know About a Crow

 

This crow has ambitions of a diva,

in her shiny black dress of smooth feathers

bejeweled by jets of black beak and eyes

She wants to sing in the opera, bask in

the applause of an enraptured audience

 

This crow years to be a primadonna

on the stage, yet her beak emits

rough squacks and grating kra – kra – kra

not enchanting in the least.

 

There is a note of exasperation in her voice:

“Why me? Why can’t I sing? Why this voice?” 

Who knows. We need crows and nightingales.

 

Light and darkness. The fluted polished

Melodies. That thrill of electric current

down the spine and the harsh warnings

“Go, go, go, time to go,

it is over.”

Published in Zwierzenia Zwierza anthology

 in Poland (Bezkres, 2020) 

 

Sunrise with Palm Trees on my Street

No crows here either. And no chemtrails, the sunrise beam points upwards... 


 Crows are the Messengers


Of fate, their harsh voices carry far through the valley

Go, go, go it is over, it is time, go.

They fly through blue skies like smudges of wood smoke

A warning. Think what you do and why.

They announce the verdict. They invade your space

in the black hour of retribution. 


You do not believe me? When you locked yourself 

in my house, and suddenly homeless I stood outside, calling 911,

 at least twenty crows paraded on the street, screeching.  

Why? Crows are the messengers. They come back 

if you do not heed their warnings. Remember when 

you knocked at my door, on the run again, seeking shelter? 

Ready to take over my life, as if I owed you? 

I half-listened to your pleading and watched 

two crows on the pine branch behind you

passing morsels of bread to each other. A warning?

A lesson of what to do? Of what not to do? Should I forget

that my mom's jewels had disappeared with you 

like smoke from last year’s fires? 


Did two crows in the pine tree tell me

to turn you away? Did they ask me to care? 

I’m not skilled in reading signs. I followed my heart, 

the fortune cookie said so. Always walk in the path of your heart. 

So I said no to you and yes to my children. And that’s all 

for today, the end of the crows and of you.

Published in Zwierzenia Zwierza 

anthology in Poland (Bezkres, 2020)


Pure Gold in Sunlight


Some people never learn, am I one of them? Or am I just inching forward and upward so slowly it seems to impartial observers I'm sliding back? Well, if I keep my eyes firmly on my goal and if I do not swerve from the straight and narrow, and if, after failing, I pick up the pieces and return to my straight and narrow of doing what's right, what's the best possible option for the largest possible number of people and other sentient beings around me... then I just float upward, into the light. 

The Egyptian Book of the Dead said that after death the heart is weighed on a scale against a single feather. If the heart is lighter than a feather, the soul can float up into the realm of bliss, if the heart is heavy with fear, worry, hate, anger, resentment, dislike - the soul has to come back and redo the lessons again and again. So let's try to be light as a feather. The first step: "absolutely no whining!"





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