Friday, July 26, 2013

Still Words in the giant forest

Sequoia National Park, Sierra Nevada, CA




In silence trees speak. As giant and thousands-year old sequoias they have even more to tell.
They told me about bears, deers and squirrels. About birth, life, death and rebirth. About the wounds from fire and the way they bear such a pain by keeping up in life.
I saw their blood, their scars, their wrinkles and their arms reaching out towards the sky whereas they are rooted on the ground.
I heard their breath, pet their wrinkled trunk, felt their roots under my feet, busted bears climbing on them. Like a little child, under these giant creatures I played the role of Dorothy in the world of the wonderful wizard of Oz.

Sequoia National Park is an enchanted forest like those I read about in some fantasy novels, a forest where you wouldn't be surprised to see some Tolkien's Hobbits or the trees themselves moving like human beings.
Into the wild it is easier to reach a meditative state of mind and creativity spontaneously comes up. This post comes from that wildness! Inspired by the forest I literally visualized some writing and communication techniques in the shape of trees.

How to manage the flow of our creativity? What are the steps to take in front of a blank page?
Trees are a good source to refer to: they suggest how we can stay with our feet on the ground but also reach our higher consciousness, where the best ideas come from.

Every time we draft some writing or we say something, words are like leaves. They are so many at the beginning of our flow of thoughts that we can't even count them.
If we don't want to be lost in the labyrinth of our mind, we need to realize that there are branches behind those leaves.

Branches are the grid, the structure through which we spread our thoughts and what we want to communicate. We can concretely organize this process by using a bulleted list of our ideas, so that we both leash our mind and keep the thread very clear to us from the beginning.

Branches are also connected to the trunk: if we write or talk far from our centre, we will deliver just fantasies without conveying a real message and there will be lack of personality.
The trunk is the power of connection between our pure creativity and the instruments that we use to express it: from that centre, all the points of our writing (the branches) and the words that come from those (the leaves) will be strongly anchored to the roots.

The roots are our experience, the background (or the underground stuff, we might say in this case!), the earth that ultimately nurtures our words. They also are the channels through which we connect to all the other trees (our public): words spreading from those channels express a conscious creative process.

How much better would it be if everybody trained their mind to think before speaking and let just flowers come out from the mouth?
If writing is both creative and rational, if words are under control and consciously expressed, the final product will have more chances to communicate with neutrality.
Neutrality corresponds to the ability of listening to the whole forest (environment) around us, from an higher point of view that allows us to see every detail, and also to the capacity of expressing ourselves with rooted wisdom and depth.
Neutral communication, as the result of the consciousness applied to each step of our creativity, is powerful and its feedback is long lasting. Just like a giant sequoia in the forest!

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Comment, communicate, share, express your creativity: I will be happy to read and answer your Still Words!