Intense creative pulse...A process of giving birth.
Definition of childbirth (According to Wikipedia):
Childbirth, also known as labour, parturition and delivery, is the completion of pregnancy where one or more babies exits the internal environment of the mother via vaginal delivery or caesarean section (Childbirth).
I am a current PhD student, and as much as I love my research topic, I admit that I HATE academic rules. I hate the pressure that perusing a PhD put in our shoulders, this background tedious running anxiety that I donβt hear enough people talking about and about its effects on mental health of junior researchers, but thatβs for another article.
I find my rhythm of study very cyclic, very changing, never was able to have a solid routine that I was able to maintain. This bothered me, I felt challenged by my own self!!!Β how can I not follow the rules that I was taught as a kid of how to peruse my studies. The rules of study hard every day for long hours, and then the external validation of everyone that this is it, PhD is hard like that, it is boring like that π but like why?
Besides my best efforts to follow the rules, work hard every day, long hours every day, I FAILED big time. I found myself doing many other activities, social work, a part time job, new projects, yoga, art class, β¦β¦etc and the more I had fun and just being the rebel that I am ALL MY LIFE of going in the other directions of the rules, the more new ideas flew to me in my research, the more I felt I am going in the right track.
And I came to notice (FINALLY) that my PhD research is something that I am creating just like a painting in art class, a healthy dish of food or an article in my Blog!!
What a discovery? ha, sometimes the obvious truth is in the blind spot of our vision maybe because it is so restricted and so obstructed that we cannot see it clearly or come to realise it.And when I started relating to my research like this, everything changed. I allowed myself my rhythm. My rhythm as a woman, and this is something I want to talk about today.
I have been reading recently about the lives of two women that I highly admire. The Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint and the American poet Emily Dickinson.
Hilma spent long years practising her spirituality in her art and Emily long years of writing her poetry. I cannot find the words to describe the excellence these two women had in their craft, and it is something that doesnβt need lots of explaining. But for me how they spent their lives following their creative impulse is what has come to fascinate me and inspire me.
They followed the impulse with itβs intensity, itβs passion, and itβs honesty.
Both women earned recognition after their deaths (of course our inheritance of sexism and its injustices) but the most form of oppression we suffered as women is in our creativity and the way that in todayβs world, we are not allowed to follow it.
Yeah, I repeat in our creativity. Having ownership of it, harnessing it, and giving birth to many things because this is what we are here to do. Our function of giving birth is not only related to birthing children (as much as it is wonderful and amazing) but we were oppressed in our creativity. The patriarchal system is a man-made system. It suits how men function (not all men also to be fair) but as women we are not created to function in rigid systems or rigid platforms of following the rules. We have cycles, and to function and give our best potential we need to follow those cycles in our creative process.
Like Hilma and Emily, we as women are intense when it comes to our creativity. I notice it as a pulse, that pushes, and an act of giving birth after lots of preparations (as gestation process).
I think this article is to be continued.