wisewords
Lead an Awe-Inspired LifeMatthew Fox Shares Insights on Creativity and The Divine by Randall B. Robertson, Founder of GladdeningLight
W
hat an honor to speak with Matthew Fox
in Oakland, CA—a spiritual master, prolifi c author and teacher, iconoclast, mystic and founder of the Institute in Culture & Creation Spirituality. First, let’s discuss the upcoming event that will prominently feature you in the Orlando area: the third annual GladdeningLight Symposium of the Spiritual Arts.
You are to speak over three days using your bestselling book, Creativity, as a thematic springboard. Your talk on Friday night, February 1, 2013 is entitled “The Advent of Creativity.” What does advent mean in this context? Are we to interpret it akin to a pregnancy, an anticipation of creation?
Well, the great Otto Rank, who is the father of humanistic psychology, defi ned the artist as “one who wanted to leave behind a gift.” So, I think there is a profound desire for the artist in all of us to give birth to something substantive, beautiful, truthful that awakens people— all qualities that constitute the sacred nature of creativity. Now, I see a great advent of creativity because our species is in such a dark place these days. All around us, we see that education, politics and media are failing. Clearly, we have to reinvent things. The darkness means that we are on the cusp of a great creative moment. Our species can only survive if we can commit to
30 Central Florida natural awakenings
recreating the way we live on this earth. The way we’re living now is not sustainable. We are destroying habitats, climates, ocean creatures, birds and all the rest. We have to start over.
Your second talk, “The Sacred Vocation of the Artist,” is scheduled for Saturday morning, February 2nd. Talk to us about the four Vias
or paths and how they correspond to the rhythm of creativity. How might these interrelate with the artist’s path?
These four paths in the creative tradition are archetypal of everything that’s going on. They begin with the experience of the Via Positiva— the experience of awe, wonder and delight. The experience of divinity is light. Awe is what triggers our intuition and wakes us up; it ignites and surprises us—like falling in love with another person or with music, science, fl owers, poetry and the earth. So many vocations begin with the act of falling in love when we’re young. The second path is the Via Negativa, the path of darkness, emptiness, silence, meditation and suffering. Grief is also a trigger for awakening our creativity and our powers. We learn in grief how truly deep we are and how connected we are to the universe. So, it too is an opening and a deepening, and again artists go through this on a regular basis—fi rst as human beings and also in terms of their work. There are highs and there are deep lows. The mystics in all of us learn how to navigate both of these. There is a darkness when wrestling with our truths.
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