✨ The Creative MOMent
The Creative MOMent is a section of the Emily Lupita ❤️🔥 Creativity Series where I share creativity prompts for journaling + my own creative journal.
Creativity Prompt: Candles For Creativity
Creating your own special candle can be a powerful way to designate a sacred place and time for creativity. You can choose to purchase or make a physical candle, but the act of drawing a candle and placing it where you create can be significant as well. I like to combine the two - I buy a scented candle I love, then also have my painting of a candle up where I can see it in my art studio. I call these my candles for creativity - lighting them (literally & metaphorically) has become a central part of my ritual to get started on a new project.
Journaling
What kind of candles do you love or have already in your home? Is there a specific scent or image that brings you peace and calm? Think of images that you love. (Pinterest has such great ideas for candles.) Is there a specific animal you feel guides you? Perhaps you are very much a cat or dog person. Or is there a specific bird you love that you often see in nature or appears to you in other ways? You may have a spirit guide from your religious tradition or from an experience you’ve had along the way of life.
Write all these ideas down in your journal and keep narrowing down the images until you come to a design you like. It’s okay to combine different candle images you find into one or include several candles or draw your own. Be free to create.
What image / scent brings a feeling of calm?
What are my favorite colors?
What spiritual guide am I close with?
☀️ What did you write? Share your thoughts in a comment.
My Creativity Journal
For my candle, I’ve chosen the prayer candles that are popular in homes and churches across Mexico and beyond. I love the beautiful pictures on the front. These candles come adorned with all sorts of different Saints, so you can choose the one you identify with most. My middle name - Lupita - is the diminutive of the name Guadalupe, basically little Guadalupe. My mother is from Mexico and she’s named after Our Lady of San Juan de Los Lagos. Most of the women in my mother’s family were named in this fashion.
For this reason, I’ve always felt a certain closeness to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and have sought her out throughout my life. One of my earliest memories from childhood is watching my mom praying to the Guadalupe statue in our flower garden up on a remote hill in rural Iowa. I decided to combine this memory with the Mexican Saints candles to create my own creativity candle, adding in plenty of the Mexico pink color that makes me so happy & is found in most of my paintings.
Further Afield
The desire to create and also the rituals surrounding creativity have been integral to humanity since the dawn of civilization, as proven by studies of art in caves dating back tens of thousands of years. I’ve had a fascination with ancient cave art and the artists who created these stunning paintings since childhood. I like the article, “A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the World” in Smithsonian Magazine for a great read about ancient cave art. Among many other interesting things, this article talks about Rhino Cave in Botswana, where there’s a large rock panel carved with hundreds of circular holes. Archeologists believe that people smashed or burned spearheads in front of this rock in a ritualistic way…an estimated 65,000-70,000 years ago. The theory is that these early humans used cave art as one of the earliest forms of connection to spiritual guides.
Another article I think is extraordinary is, “Ancient Cave Artists May Have Knowingly Deprived Themselves of Oxygen to Paint” in ScienceAlert online. This article talks about how art is found so deep inside caves that the artists must have been deprived of oxygen. It discusses the particular air flow in caves and how the combination of smoke from torches and the inevitable hypoxia would’ve induced an altered state of consciousness. This altered state, plus the pure sensory deprivation of a deep cave, caused the artists to make some truly fantastic art. Talk about a “candle for creativity.” 🕯
One of the most famous examples of ancient cave art lies deep inside France's Chauvet Cave, where the walls are covered with some of the world's oldest surviving paintings. This is the subject of the incredible documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The first time I watched this documentary, I felt like time stopped. I was absolutely enthralled.
This, I thought as I watched the cave paintings come to life on screen, gets right to the heart of creativity. This desire to communicate, to reach out across the millennia or across the stars…or both…this is what we’re all doing when we create. This 2 minute preview alone gives me goosebumps - it’s breathtaking.
I’ve had a couple mind-altering experiences in caves. The first was as a child with my dad. I write about it in this excerpt below taken from a work-in-progress called, The Poet’s Daughter.
“The Cave”
by Emily Lupita
The poet used to take my brothers and me to caves. He would crawl deep into the rock, searching for a certain room filled with crystals he had seen in a dream and that had surfaced in one of his poems. My brothers and I would follow. One such cave was a massive labyrinth somewhere near a river. We slid so far back that we lost our way and the poet had to leave me and my brother alone somewhere along one of the passageways to go and search for a way out.
The darkness in the cave was so complete. My brother and I couldn't see each other even though we sat right next to each other in a strong embrace. We started to breathe faster and faster. Our breath sounded like a tornado whipping through the cavern. We sat and held each other, too stunned and exhausted to cry. We could hear our own heartbeats. There's no telling how many hours we sat there until at last we saw a ray of light moving toward us in the darkness.
"Don't move, I'm coming to you," the poet yelled as he finally made his way back to us across the jagged rocks and mud on the floor of the cavern. When Dad reaches us we climb up into his arms.
"Where have you been?" we ask the poet.
Between the place of dying and the place of living I have been walking. Past the point of stemming I have traveled.
Our father answers with a poem and carries us across the echoing cavern. He lifts us up and sets us inside a hole just big enough for us all to fit.
While in the high heavens the star sisters are waiting for the moonlit children to come dancing through great clouds.
'We crawl upward, upward, toward the light.
Clouds that are climbing into a sky laced with soft fingers eagerly stretch toward the pale light of a gentler good morning.
Maybe the poet thought we would find in the real world the crystal room he'd dreamt about, and if so, that it would verify the validity of his dreams. Or maybe he believed he was dreaming and was praying that he would wake up before watching his children die. Did he mix the two worlds somehow, nearly costing us our lives?
Now that I’ve read the scientific article about oxygen deprivation in caves…I’m wondering if perhaps my father suffered from hypoxia and entered an altered state of consciousness. And perhaps my brother and I did, too. Maybe?
Because of this childhood experience, I feel a deep connection to the ancient artists who painted those incredible animals in southern France all those thousands of years ago deep inside that cave. Traveling that far, especially using a fire torch, it would’ve been dangerous and exciting and life-altering for sure.
And not only being inside the cave…when you emerge from a cave, especially after many hours in total darkness, the blast of visual beauty outside is overwhelming. The sounds, the smells, the sheer vastness of the everyday beauty in front of you…it all comes at once and just absolutely shocks the brain and the heart. At least that’s how I remember it.
But we don’t need any experience in a cave to imagine the journey these ancient artists took. We can close our eyes and walk with them as they enter, go down the rough passageways, and enter the room where they’d work. The documentary and articles give us an incredible sense of what could’ve happened there, but we still have the chance to fill in the gaps of time and knowledge with our own imagination.
Journaling
What does this ancient cave art spark in you?
Do you connect with a specific painting shown in the cave documentary or idea in the articles?
If you were an ancient artist, what / who would you paint and why?
☀️Share your reflections
I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections on this post.
Thank you for reading.
Good journey,
❤️🔥Emily Lupita
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