Creative Impulse at Feather River Art Camp

By Karen LeGault

Feather River Art Camp provides a precious opportunity to let go of our daily life for a week and wake up to our own creative dreaming/daydreaming space. The poem below by Selene Steese, written at Feather River Art camp in Clive Matson's writing class, evokes this for me. We can savor the tender or ripe fleeting moments, whether in the half light in the wee hours of the pre-dawn, following our own ripples on the surface of the water in an afternoon swim, sitting in a grove of knurly oak and towering pines as the light filters patterns through the branches, listening to insects or fellow Art Campers laughing, or to the silent intensity of their concentration on projects unfolding.

Our creative impulses are nourished and given time to flow through: brushes into paintings, strings plucked into music, lusciously colored glass rods under torches spinning into luminescent glass beads, shards of glass and tile melting into pictures or designs, words gathering mass into stories and poems. Our creative impulse is like the moth with its "tiny gossamer heart." Who knows where its release will lead it or how it will transform our being!

The Savior of Moths

By Selene Steese ©2003

In the silver-blue silence
of dusk, the moths
began to gather.

When night pitched
its starry tent
they congregated
at all the churches
of light.

I saw the dun gossamer dust
of their wings
as they dipped-flew-danced
through my flashlight beam.

If hope is the thing
with feathers
what are these things
with dun dust wings?

I woke in the early hours
when dark silver-grey
filled the cabin door.

I felt something
flutter-beat-fluttering
a tiny gossamer heart
in my half-closed hand

I thought I held a piece
of my rebellious
dream, a thread
of magic pulled from where
the dreaming mind goes.

How could there be a moth
in my hand?
A life fluttering
beating
in my hand?

As I swept my arm out
and unclosed the cage
of my fingers
I knew what was right:

to hold onto small things,
to all things
long enough to feel wonder
understand the gift

then let them go.

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