The wind is blowing and lets the leaves dance. I breathe in the crisp air and out again. In and out.
The light is golden, the larches change colour, the frost embraces us and the peaks of the mountains are white, as if powdered with icing sugar.
Wafts of mist journey through the valley, a fire burns in the stove, the last vegetables are harvested.
Everything is so beautiful, I could take picture after picture, write poems, compose songs, shoot films, catch those light-flooded days of fall. But I'm not. I'm just standing there, in the woods, at the river's edge, on the trail and I watch and I marvel.
Nature is retiring and my creativity adapts to it. I can feel my focus going inwards again, how I'm craving calmness and retreat. It took me a while to notice that this process is going on within me as my head is still in full-on summer mode. It wants to do, to experience, to create, to birth ideas, to be outside and alive and it wants to share. But with the changing of the season something in me changed, too.
Our creativity behaves like the seasons, Helena Woods writes on her blog. The creative cycle begins with an idea forming, a seed planted in the earth. In the second phase this idea gets realized and manifested in order to be reflected in the third. And lastly, in the phase of winter, you rest.
I spent my summer recording a children's songs album that I recently published. Originally I thought that I would finally have time to dedicate myself to other ideas after completing this big project. Songs were already forming in my head, thoughts on videos and compositions for photos. But now I'm sitting here and I can't do any of that, even though I would very much like to. At first I was annoyed by it, I desperately wanted to shoot a video about fall, catch the wonderful light, show and share my routines. But the completion of the children's song project brought fall with it, a time of reflection and turning inwards.
It's still not easy for me to go with the flow of these natural cycles. Living in a society that values doing more than being enhances the struggle as well. But if I learned one thing since moving to the mountains almost a year ago, it's this: I am part of nature. Nature exists within me and I exist within nature.
I am learning to accept that I, as a creative being, can't produce physical results at all times and that I also don't have to. But that I am allowed to rest when the phase of winter comes, so that in the spring I am able to start anew.
