Soaring Eagle - Creative Manifesto

I believe words can make a difference, can make or unmake a person, even a world.

I believe writing and telling have power: the power to evoke, create, and give life to memory and generations to come.
I believe I can make a difference in your life through my words.
Because I select only sound ones, the ones that last and give you a chance to jump high and make summersaults in the sky.
I believe when all is said and done and I will be dead, I will have left my words behind like a track, a path in a silent wood of evergreens.
I believe now I have to write and tell.
Now that love is under siege and freedom is being threatened.
Now it is the time to write. To say what I am about, what my stories are meant to do in the world: my writing, words flowing through me like a stream. It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation from fear and what is stale.
Writing is an act of freedom.
In the face of intimidation.
In the face of fear and terror.
In the face of dullness.
In the face of forgetfulness.

I want to change the world one word at a time.

One nuance, one feeling at a time, with the power of story and poetry. Flowing with the energy of well-crafted, carefully chosen, polished words. Emotions are carried through words.
I don’t want to go through life insulated, protected from the sound of the world and its inner stillness, from my vulnerability, my honest facing of myself and the sharing of emotions and feelings with people I hardly know according to common sense.
I want to write, tell and flow with the words coming from the unknown, from the mystery beyond you and me.
I want to see a world transformed for the better by the power of words: word power that transmutes and heals, that transcends meanness and pettiness. I want my writing and telling to inspire and uplift.
To spur people to read beyond the ordinary, to read the extraordinary in the ordinary.

I want to write with an audience in mind. My audience is unrepentant dreamers

that mend their broken wings and dare to fly again and again: those who risk looking like fools, risk showing their vulnerability, risk going out in the world with their egos broken and their defences lowered.
I want to spread this message: dare to be vulnerable, be your authentic self, even when setting safe boundaries, and don’t erect barriers that shut you down and exclude people and the world around you.
My writing is about rediscovering the power of sensibility. The uses of being highly sensitive in a rough world. A world we as a race have made so.
I don’t want to write with violence in my heart. Even when dealing with violent issues, I am looking for a peaceful spot inside, where I can find the wise words needed for those circumstances.

I love opening up paths in the heart, mine and those of my readers through the wise, magical use of words.

Writing can regenerate us.
Writing can give us focus and resilience. And a mode of relating. Writing is inspiration and communication.
I have always thought that writing can change my world and your world, the world of all the people who dare to take a pen in their hands and jot down what it is they feel, think and do.

As a writer, I feel it is my responsibility to make readers pause, see and feel

through the word webs I weave, so that they may catch what is most relevant to them personally at a specific time.
Writing to me is an exercise in mindfulness and compassion. And in clarity.
When writing, I gradually come out of a muddled state of mind and emerge into clarity and single-mindedness, focusing on what wants to be expressed through me at a certain time.

What do I mean by “inspire” and “uplift”?

To inspire: to breathe in, to breathe within, to bring the breath of life, fresh air.
To nudge people into deep breathing, inhaling life and exhaling staleness through the power of beautiful words, stories, poems, essays...
To uplift: to raise, to take up and above, beyond routine and habit. To help people see from a new, alternative point of view, to see things with a different slant.

I want my writing to be precise and to evoke feelings and moods that enable the audience to reflect and ponder, to go within,

to go deep into reflection, to hibernate like a bear in the dark caves of their souls and wait there for what visions are to come. To retrieve their own personal visions.
How can I do this? My writing, stories and poems are aids, enabling an interdimensional journey for the audience, where they may find what they need most from time to time.
Writing, story-making and creativity, in general, are shamanism: shamanic practices, ancient and ever-new technologies of the soul, of the unconscious.
Creativity is soul retrieval. It is becoming whole again, if not for the first time.

That’s the power of creativity:

Making us whole in front of our battered selves and a fragmented world, where every day we need to descend without losing our souls, strength and dreams.
Creativity is a journey where we find meaning and refuge. It is a home full of possibilities for liberation. Creativity is our way to freedom and self-expression, our way of becoming whole, of becoming who we truly are and who we are meant to be.
There are chances and byways that need to be taken to fully embody our creative force.
Creativity is a numinous power and writing is both a sublime and exacting way to channel it.
The mechanics of the writing hand and its movement on the page is an ordinary miracle.

Following the rhythm of the writing hand, of the voice within which dares to speak out, we land in the unknown realm of the heart: hic sunt leones. Dangerous and unexplored.

We plunge deep within. Sometimes in quicksand. It takes all our stamina and willpower to follow our writing hand and telling voice to get out.

Do this: draw arabesques of words on the page, in the sky, on the sea and attune your ear to their silent music. It’s like the wind among the reeds, the swallow’s flight, the scent of a forget-me-not.
Do more of this: let your words rise like magnificent palaces, towering against the sky, into the clouds, let them speak aloud and resonate in the atmosphere.
Let them fly from your notebooks and PCs into the aerial realm of story and poetry… free them forever in the world and in your own life through writing and speaking them out aloud, whispering them, proclaiming them, if it needs to be.
Do less of this: dwell on the past with a regretful attitude.
Envision what the collective past of human civilization may have been like, but never dwell on your past in a way that makes you stuck and melancholic.
Whatever it was that we did, whatever mistake was not meant as such. We thought we knew better. Therefore, with today's knowledge, we are wiser and need not beat ourselves up, we need not feel we are failures.
And if we decide today to devote our lives to poetry, it is much better to have stored a vast sum of experiences. And nuances, shades of meaning, colours, flavours, sounds, sensations, impressions, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and encounters.

Fugitive encounters, no matter how fleeting and ephemeral, can be among the most revealing of materials for an aspiring poet.

Poetry is distillation. Poetry is going beyond and within the obvious, the self-evident, to uncover the secret beat of things, people, and events.
I believe there are inner rhythms to everything and every living being. As a poet, I feel I have to discover and uncover them behind the hum-drum of routine and the greyness of habit.
There are so many inexplicable circumstances, in spite of our rational explanations.
Poetry is a guarantee for the preservation of what cannot be explained away.
Poetry makes us human. More than that, it humanises the inexplicable and naturalises the human without reducing them.
Poetry is a bridge, a rainbow uniting those many colours and rhythms springing and dancing on this beautiful, sad earth.

When I write a poem, any poem, or a story, I want it to vibrate with silent, bursting music, music that comes from the quality of the visual, aural, and tactile images I present to my readers.

And when I tell them, they become embodied through my voice and moods, and tones to convey emotions and feelings and provoke new thoughts and ways of seeing into being.
The rhythm follows the imagery: it is inherent in the multifarious elements displayed and interwoven in a choreography.
Writing poems, stories, and essays is a practice for being here at this moment. It allows me to preserve my understanding of this moment, this peculiar gift of insight and imagination that will pass away unless I write it down.
Even as I write of a faraway point in time and space, I am living in the now, bypassing the workings of time.
In the act of writing and telling, I am discovering Kairos, an imaginative time beyond Chronos: a time that is amplified, stretched and compressed according to my will, a spiral-like time, where nothing is ever lost, only raised, taken up to the next level, or taken down to a lower stage of a recurring mixture of patterns, motives and themes.

Attuning to the present moment through the power of imagination and being inspired and uplifted in the process:

this is the power of creative writing – and it can be extended and enriched through active reading.
Thus, I write and tell to transfigure and discover the present moment by making sense of that imaginary, yet real, place where the consequences of the past and the expectations for the future converge in a core of stillness.
A place and a moment of vision, altered perception and feeling.

Poetry can clean the slate: the immaculate purity of the present moment can come through a transparent veil.

Poetry can make the moment innocent again and raise it beyond contingency and meaninglessness.
Black, thick ink on a transparency projected onto the sky velvet, the tender green of the treetops, the white-washed walls of newly refurbished houses: the world encompassed in the language of poetry, in the enchanting rhythm of the creative word.
To weave a fine cloth of powerful words to be spread on the wounded and the broken to make them whole.
Poetry heals our emotions.
It makes us cry, smile, pause and think, it makes us breathe deeper. It breaks our false, assured voices into whispers and sighs.
It makes us speak in our true voices: we speak up and take a stand.
It urges us to say aloud what we care about and to act, and be authentic and congruent.

For all these reasons and more, I write, tell and listen to the intense heartbeat of things and creatures in the middle of the night, at daybreak, noon and twilight.

And all the while the words that come to me soar, like an eagle, beyond my deliberation and intent. Words I observe as they take off, following mysterious tracks in the sky; yet they are not mine only, they will never be. Luminous. I don’t know whence they come from and can only accompany them on their trajectories so far… I can’t see where they will hit the mark and when, what message, and what emotions a passer-by will extract from them. Like magic boxes, words of power fly; they are arrows, winged messengers on a mission; they deliver secrets, lessons and, sometimes, boons. But to the poet, it is not given to know how.

I watch my eagle words fly high above, away from where I dream, suffer and feel. May they accomplish their secret mission. May they bring deliverance in any form needed in the world.