For weeks now I’ve felt a slow gathering of creative energies inside me. Something new wants to take shape, to be expressed. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, this buildup of energy, but it’s also exciting. It makes me feel like I am a part of all living things, and so it feels right that this creative impulse would intensify with the emergence of nature’s newborn life.
“You must give birth to your images,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke. “They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.”
In the meantime, I think I’ll get organized. Is it a coincidence that spring fever is accompanied by spring cleaning? I don’t think so. Not for me. I want to be ready to catch everything I can as it drops into my imagination, because I know from experience that what can start as a gentle pitter-patter of thoughts and ideas about a particular writing project can quickly turn into a deluge, and before I know it my mind is bursting, my desk is covered in post-it notes and index cards, and stacks of books grow around me like weeds.
And every time, I think: there must be a better way!
If the chaos is resisted, overwhelm sets in, followed by a low mood, the need for comfort food, and an extreme allergy to feeling pressured in any way. What all seemed so possible, now seems, well … not. Willingness and curiosity dissolve into fear and the need to prematurely corral and control, which then morphs into paralysis by analysis, and a whole lot of nothing getting done.
My husband, bless him, has learned two words never to say to me during one of these internal tornadoes: “just write.”
Of course, he’s right. But that’s not the point!
OK, yes it is.
It is.
We learn by doing, by getting inside the creative act and moving with it. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’s always going to be. But when one is in a contracted (i.e., meltdown state of mind), the creative valve closes. So one can hardly be expected to plop down at the page and produce. Hmph! My frightened mind wants to bellow, “Don’t you see it’s not that easy? I must open a vein first!”
I remember my beloved high school teacher, Mrs. Chyrchel, explaining to her College-Bound English class what it would take to earn a passing grade on our senior thesis. No doubt the lot of us looked petrified. She curled her hand into a fist, then used it and her forearm as a model to demonstrate how blood moves through the brainstem and beyond during acts of creativity and problem-solving.
The point, as I recall, is that when we succumb to self-doubt and second-guessing we stanch the flow, staying stuck in the small, dark closet of self-preservation instead of continuing on to the bright meadow of imagination.*
Or, in other words:
Fear ≠ Creativity
These days, I like to think of my mind unfurling like a big pink peony, receptive to fresh ideas and novel ways of thinking, so I can attract inspired thoughts like butterflies and let seemingly unrelated ideas cross-pollinate.
So that’s what I’m going to do. Relax and unfurl. You know, just as soon as I get organized. Promise. I really do have a bookshelf to assemble so I can get these bookweeds out of the way.
Till then, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing (or avoiding doing), I wish you luck in leaning into your own inner and outer obstacles and finding your strength there. As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.”
Keep going and growing and have a beautiful Sunday!
Love this and will share it with my mom.
Paralyses by analysis...this is great!!