The Creative Process — Drawing Water from the Well of Mystery and Faith

On the farm where my mama grew up, there is a cistern well. When I was a little girl, it was a treat to get to turn the handle on it, to try to produce water from within it, through this effortful act of working that asked me with each turn of the crank how badly I wanted the water, if it was worth going on. I liked the effort; there was always the possibility that it wouldn’t work, that this time for some reason the water wouldn’t come. There was also always the possibility that it would. I enjoyed the suspense, I think, this equal parts faith and fear, this hoping in something that wasn’t guaranteed. When the water showed itself, it felt like a gift.

This is the thing about turning a handle on an old cistern: first, there is nothing. Then, slowly, unseen, you hear the water. Faint, from somewhere deep within the earth, then stronger. Keep turning and turning until the water dredges itself up. Feel it splash on your ankles. It is muddy and unusable at first, and then, with more working and working, it becomes clean, clear, useful. Water.

A large part of the creative process is not knowing. For me, it is a force that pulls me along through a project, this unknown I hold within myself alongside my desire to understand it. Making art teaches me to trust my intuition, to trust the word, image or feeling that for some reason interests me, to find out why it resonates within me. It is both holy fear of and comfort with mystery.

Both living life and making art have a lot to do with having faith. Faith that you already have everything you need and that what you don’t, time and the universe will gift to you. We carry our art around within ourselves, the summation of everything that has happened to us next to the things we want to know that propel us to find out, pieces we configure and reconfigure to make meaning.

In “The Writing Life,” Annie Dillard writes it like this: “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

So let us be astonished. Let us probe mystery — ours, the world’s, God’s. Let us cultivate wonder and generation and discipline and revision to draw water from the well. Let us put it in order, this world that gifts itself to us.