Slowing down – using your creativity to stop the world

No time by mag3737, under a Creative Commons licence

Christian McEwen (author of World Enough and Time – Creativity and Slowing Down) is coming to the SPL to conduct two special workshops. During them, you will discover how to use reading and writing to slow the ever-accelerating world down to a sane level. In this excerpt from World Enough and Time, McEwen outlines some of the themes she will explore in her workshops (see below for more details).

The artist Paulus Berensohn was thought to be slow, even ‘retarded’, as a boy, when in fact he was simply dyslexic. Now in his seventies, he has made his peace with slowness, which he sees as a necessary prerequisite for any art.

'Creativity can be very fast and very spontaneous,' he told me. But first there had to be time to dream and drift, to listen and attend. “Imagination comes into us before it comes out of us. It is a receptive, a feminine process… Imagination for me requires slowness.”

Berensohn is a well-known potter, and a dancer too, who has published several books. He has worked with clay for more than forty years. Early on, he took up pinch-pot work, which he describes as 'throwing in extreme slow motion'. As he explains in one of his books, 'The more I pinched, the slower I seemed to move; my breath deepened and my very posture… seemed to become less tense…My pinch pots asked to be formed slowly, quietly, and with deep attention.' Often he would close his eyes or lower his gaze in order to focus more completely on the feeling of the clay: how cold it was, how wet; how it felt, right at that moment. It was clear to him that both clay and potter needed time to ripen. Only then could he 'breathe the spirit of his life' into the living clay.

Finding One’s Way with Clay appeared in 1972, and became a surprise best-seller. For a while, Berensohn was full of ambition – he was going to write six other books, and give hundreds of workshops and teach – but then suddenly he became very sick, and couldn’t work any more. He went to San Diego in search of alternative healing, arriving, by chance, on Christmas Eve. The next day almost everything was closed. But one movie theater was open, and it happened to be showing Bergman’s The Magic Flute.

While the overture was being played, Ingmar Bergman flashes on one face after another, one face after another. But every ninth face is the face of a young girl, about nine years old. I knew immediately that it was his own daughter, and that he had made the movie as a teaching story for his child. It’s all about the masculine finding its feminine. I came out of the theater saying to myself, that’s what will heal me.

He started to drive back to his motel, across a long causeway.

In the middle of the causeway was this huge illuminated star, because it was Christmas. When I got back to the motel, I thought, well what am I going to do? I don’t have any clay. But I opened a drawer and besides the Bible, there was a match-book with a needle in it, and three or four colors of yarn. This was a fantastic moment in my life. I had some cloth that I had wrapped around the chopsticks that I travel with. So I took that piece of cloth and I thought, 'Oh, I’ll stitch a star'. I sat down in a chair and turned on the lamp above me, and threaded the needle and put the needle underneath the cloth, you know, and brought it up through the tissue of the cloth. As the point of the needle came through the cloth, the light of the lamp bounced off its tip and it became a star. I lifted up this needle, and it became a sword, a silver sword. And that was a gift of the feminine.

His friend the theologian Matthew Fox once described Berensohn as practicing ‘extrovert meditation’. Berensohn himself prefers the word active. 'Active meditation, you know, like active imagination.’ To this day, he still sews regularly. ‘I have seven art forms at least: reading, writing, clay-work, stitchery, book-making, dancing, doodling. And all of it is to slow me down.’ He is easily overwhelmed, he says, by the contemporary torrent of news and information and entertainment. ‘It can drive you crazy, especially if you’re a hysteric. Or you can take it slow. You can say, 'Take your time. Take your time to embody it."'

Christian McEwen will conduct two special workshops at the SPL.

Ordinary Joy: Reading, Writing, Drawing, Slowing Down is held on 1 September, 1pm to 3pm. We are now selling a special End of Festival ticket for £12, for all those in serious need of slowing down.

There is a second session for teachers, who may feel the need for less speed more than anyone as the summer holidays come to a close. CPD World Enough & Time : Creativity & Slowing Down
 is for  teachers of all levels, literacy co-ordinators, subject leaders, librarians, school management, learning assistants. Held at the SPL, tickets are £20 per head.  To book, phone 0131 557 2876 or email Lorna at education@spl.org.uk.