Awen and Imbas: Remembering the Way to Creative Flow

How to use the druids' gift of "poetic inspiration" to do innovation differently

In Ireland, it’s called imbas forosnai.

In Wales, it’s awen.

The ancient gift of the druids. The very essence of creativity. Utterly mysterious and yet, completely accessible.

…If you’ll open yourself to the flow.

Imbas forosnai. The inspiration that illuminates.
Awen. The source of poetry, of prophecy, of art, and renewal.

These words may be foreign to you, but they’re an essential part of the ancient human story.

We live in a world obsessed with innovation and invention.
Build a better mousetrap. A better semiconductor. A better planet.
Ever on. Push it upward. Progress to the more, and more, and more.  

How’s that going for you?

Imbas and awen… they are at the core of all innovation and invention, too. But I think they work differently.

They help us be in state of creativity, rather than rushing to do and perform creativity. They help us strengthen the core and shore up the circle. They help us anchor into what we already know in our bones, but may have forgotten when life is lived at the surface level.

Imbas and awen remind us to look to the entire circle of trees, from highest boughs to deepest roots. These ancient magics call us to reckon with ferns and mosses, soil and mycelia, bugs and birds, too. They reveal the stories, symbols, and allies that will guide the way forward.

Re-member.
Go slow.
Take it all in. 

Repeat the chorus. Savor it on your tongue. Ask the inspiration to seep further in.
Let it take you deeper down before it takes you to the next horizon.

Want to dive deeper into imbas forosnai?

Listen to the imbas poet Laura Murphy’s two KnotWork stories, Bóinn Re:membered and Brigid: Rebirth of the Mother.

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Re-membering Creative Being After a Season of (over)Doing

This week, I released the last episode of Season 3 of KnotWork Storytelling. We’ll be back in August or September with a new series of stories and conversations.

After the heady rush of the last fifteen weeks of gloriously relentless story production, I am going to be more gentle with my creative energy for a while. There’s a new vegetable garden in the backyard asking for work, play, and love. I am hoping to let imbas and awen flow with newfound peace, and let that peace come dropping slow. 

I tell the story of Ceridwen’s cauldron and the birth of Taliesin. It’s a tale of frantic shape shifting and transformation, but before the goddess-sorceress-witch pursues young Gwion in that mad race, it is a story about waiting. 

As you might notice, the potion that is meant to give the gift of awen takes a year and a day to brew.

In our “do it immediately, just ship it, press publish” (and then get up and do it all again next week, if not the next day) media landscape, it is hard to imagine that kind of waiting game.

I don’t plan to completely vanish into the Hudson Valley landscape over the next few months, but I am excited to see what happens when I let the cookfire settle into coals so I can let the imbas simmer more slowly over time.

As we enter into the next flurry of growth as spring sinks deep into the bones of the northern hemisphere, I hope you can do something revolutionary: take it slow and see what unfolds when you rest into the flow of creative being.

Maybe you’ll pick up Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Maybe you’ll pick up a pen and just draw flower vines in the margins if the words won’t come.

Maybe you’ll listen to one of the forty-five episodes of KnotWork Storytelling that are there waiting for you.

And, maybe, you’ll follow the flow and be inspired to start your own story

My postseason rest will look a lot like asking my novel-in-progress come back to life allowing myself an extra hour with a good book. (The Gospel According to Blindboy in 15 Short Stories is blowing my mind right now.)

It also looks like holding space for others’ stories.

I am excited to announce that I have launched a brand new website that focuses on my writing coaching services for aspiring authors and creative entrepreneurs.

This work is not new to me, by any means. But, over the last year of mythworking and podcasting, my coaching business was kind of… eclipsed.

Deliriously grateful to have had the chance to lavish my attention on my own creative passions, I long to help new writing coaching clients explore theirs.

If you have a book inside you, a professional vision that wants to emerge through words and story, or you feel the tug of a big creative project that just hasn’t taken shape yet, let’s talk.