“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your own paintings served a husbandly purpose. Ruburt married an artist first and a male secondly. You married a poet first and a female secondly. Ruburt’s feminine characteristics however were tied up in his poetry and in his body, so obviously that you could not forget that womanliness.

At the same time, because of it, and because of his love for you, Ruburt tried to be the good wife by relating to you in the way he thought you wanted him to—as a writer. To be too womanly might bring about the catastrophe of childbirth, and in the terms in which you both operated once, destroy you as artists.

Creativity, and artistic creativity most of all, is spontaneous. It does not have to be forced or protected. Those that have it will use it naturally. It possesses its own drive, as that flower does. (As Seth, Jane pointed to the Christmas amaryllis that sat on the coffee table between us.) It can be encouraged, watched and tended, but it grows as a natural part of the personality. The drive is built into it, like the seed in a plant. The two go together.

There is no one with a great talent who does not use it, for the drive is comparable to the talent, and the whole personality knows about it as the flower knows about blossoms. The writer cannot grow at the expense of the person, for the writer springs out of the person, and not the other way around. The person is a writer. There can be no writer without a person. An artist is free to use his ability as far as his person is free. The writer cannot survive without the survival of the person. The writer’s or the artist’s intuitions, sensibilities, inspirations come through his person, through his experiences and temperament. There are no divisions. There is one self.