The Fire Inside

The Fire Inside

Chapter One: The Fire Inside

We all have deep within us a yearning, a passion, a desire to make and to do, to create something out of our hearts and imaginations that did not exist before. To bring forth something new upon the earth. It is innate in us, this intense wanting, and when we are engaged in the specific type of creativity we were meant to do—whether it be painting, writing, making music or designing a new way to educate our children—we experience what Martha Graham calls “a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening.” It’s what puts the spark in our eyes, the skip in our steps. It is the fire inside.

Do you know that fire? Sometimes it manifests itself as restlessness, a vague dissatisfaction, a feeling that there is something important you must do, you have to do, to be true to yourself. It is the little ache you feel when you read a story that is heartbreakingly true and think I want to do that, or when you see a painting that stuns you with its power, and your fingers itch to pick up a paintbrush.

Maybe it isn’t exactly clear what is burning inside, what you want and are put on earth to do. Or perhaps you know in your bones that you must write poetry, you must dance or die, you must create gardens of incredible beauty, but maybe you’re afraid that if you try you will fall flat on your face. You doubt yourself and your abilities.

This is the way we humans are, having an intense wanting on one hand, fear and doubt on the other. But let us accept as an essential truth that we are all creative, wildly creative, each and every one of us—that we have vast reserves of untapped talents and abilities—songs only we can write, sculptures waiting to be born from the unique spirit that is us; and when we accept that belief and act on it, oh, then! We wake each day with a new animation, a vibrancy and passion. We feel like children let out of a stuffy classroom into a blue-sky spring day, and we can’t wait to see what we can do with it.

The fire inside is the “something” that fascinates you, intrigues you, so that you go to sleep and wake up thinking about it. You want to study it from all its interesting angles and make it central to your life, keep working at it, falling short in your aspirations at times, but trying and trying again. And if you are not currently involved with something that brings with it such zeal, if you’ve kept your fire tamped down, unable to act on your passion for whatever reason, know that it is still there— the beginning of days filled with intense purpose and meaning, waiting for you.

You can take a closer look at (and pre-order) The Fire Inside here. For more about the writing and creative life, you can visit our home page.

“The Fire Inside” Creative Exercise:

Each of us was put on this earth with certain innate talents and abilities, things we were meant to do. Some of us can identify almost immediately what these might be, what is “calling” to us. For others of us, it may take a little time. The best way to do so is to follow the love trail.

What do you love?  What puts the shine in your eyes? (And there will be more than one thing.) Find some meditation time, some time alone, and consider what you love, what might be calling to you. Maybe it is spending time messing with watercolors, or taking pictures and arranging them in a scrapbook to tell a story. Maybe you love figuring out the plots in mystery novels. Jot these down in your notebook. Try this exercise several times a week, several times a month. You’ll begin to see patterns and themes and it may become clearer what you love to do.