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Babies cry. Flowers stretch. Kettles sing.
The shadows on the wall at sunset grow. Guns fire. Breath runs out. Grief rises. Fear grips. I whisper these three words again and again: Love lives here. The earth shakes, she crumbles, she steadies. We wake up and the news flashes. Light and darkness - they trade places. The clock ticks fake time. I whisper again: Love lives here. I follow these syllables one by one. They are my japa mala when I’m searching for the center of my heart in times of instability and crisis. I touch my lips to each word and listen for the secret of impermanence. In the hungry hush of groundless being, we have one anchor and it is the practice of loving. This practice involves a seemingly simple core truth, yet it proves to be a giant stumbling block for pretty much…all humans. Everyone deserves to be loved. Light melts. Animals sound. Bodies rest. Alarms wail. Trees bow. Tides rush in. How do we find love when there is anger, terror, devastation or grief between us and the love that weaves us? We hold a council in our heart for the meeting of everything. We sit tenderly beside the judgment and the pain. We call out to love when we can’t feel its presence. We name what we seek to remember. This human experience - it is a mysterious skydive. To love in the face of impermanence is astoundingly courageous and it contains within it the code of eternity. Oh beautiful songbirds, let’s be patient together. We are recalling something as we fall. We are the gasp between two places and love is a tunnel. We are time travelers, but time is false, connections are real and they are leading us beyond life and death, into a luminous origin story. Doors open. Knowledge dissolves. Memories surface. The spacious moment curves its finger. We are dreaming a deep dream. We are the circle circling. We are home and I promise, we are ready. Love lives here.
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About a year ago, something big happened. It involved a raucous breakthrough and it permanently altered my relationship with the Muse.
But first let me back up and create some atmosphere. I was trudging through the second draft of my manuscript, burdened by my own anxiety. It lingered, (this slippery anxious energy), in my muscles and joints like a parasite. It presented itself as a kind of gut gripping perception that this is such hard work and it might end up being terrible and time is running out according to...someone, (I’m not sure who), and oh god I’m an awful person, (I’m not sure why), and my book hates me. Things weren’t really flowing, creatively speaking. Hmmm. I wonder why? One evening I got tired of my own bullshit. In a moment of total exhaustion I bowed down beneath the weight of self criticism and with swift grace, a revelation bowed down beside me. I was flooded with the powerful, visceral recognition of the miracle of creativity. My cells began to buzz. I laid on the floor wide eyed and moved my hands from my belly to my heart. My joy was uncontainable. Oh my god, I thought, a smile stretching across my face. I have this invisible and eternal source within me called creativity. I am in relationship with this source as long as I am breathing. In fact, I’m probably still in relationship with this source when I stop breathing. This source is here to nourish me and create beauty. It is a well of endless interest for my mind and delight for my soul. It never runs out. No one can take it for me. It is the opposite of scarcity. It’s the closest thing to Love that isn’t Love. We are all gifted with it. We get to use it in whatever way we please. And I’ve chosen to tell stories. Oh my god. I have stories to tell! My book is one of those stories! I love this story and I get to unfold it... How lucky am I?! Awhile back I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I highly recommend. She speaks directly and eloquently to the idea I’m touching on above - that inspiration is an entity we enter into relationship with and like anything or anyone we are in relationship with, it expands and contracts based on our approach. The book impacted me profoundly and the resonance of her teachings finally seemed to be stitching a coherent action plan into my psyche. The next day when I sat down to write, I had this loving gratitude, this perspective of awe, this sense of the miraculous coursing through my body. And guess what? My story started to speak to me in entirely new ways. An important character who had been annoyingly evasive suddenly stepped forward, moving toward my adoration like a sea of ants toward a drop of honey. So my friends, that was my breakthrough. It’s simple and it isn’t. We are lucky to live with creativity inherently imprinted in our DNA. It doesn’t matter what, (non-harmful), thing we do with it. Yet, if we enter into loving relationship with it, if we build it an altar in our hearts and feed it wonder, we will find that our creativity surges forward like a cleansing wave and extracts our heavy pretenses. We will find that we have everything we need inside us. We will find that we have an invisible magic and the fortitude to make it visible. And isn’t that the blessing of a lifetime? Isn’t that worth freaking out about? |
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