I haven't blogged in awhile, and usually I keep that on Myspace, but I liked what I had to say here, and the fact I'm up taking care of sick people... poor barf monkeys... Part of it is that I get super busy, my brain gets stressed, and then I just can't think straight. Creativity seems to come and go in cycles for me. Sometimes my strength is full, sometimes it is empty. Julia Cameron, the author of the Artist Way, writes that the morning pages, a set of three pages written daily, without fail, are the key to keep "flow" going.
I agree that the morning pages are fundamental to creativity. Stagnation is never an option. I think many of us feel that our lives are a piece of art that must be Michaelangelo-slaved over, a monolithic sculpture that must be tweaked and hammered and carved into perfection. The picture HAS to be perfect. Maybe I'm just venting my own Freudian issues here, but there is something to be said about trying to achieve the "American Dream", that proverbial "Perfect Scenario" described in Fight Club. I quote as I have quoted this part before:
Narrator: Like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct...I'd flip through catalogues and wonder, "What kind of dining set defines me as a person."
Narrator: I don't know. It's just when you buy furniture you tell yourself, "That's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need. Whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled." I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.
Tyler: Shit man, now it's all gone.
Narrator: All gone.
Tyler: All gone...Do you know what a duvet is?
Narrator: A comforter...
Tyler: It's a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
Narrator: ...Consumers?
Tyler: Right. We are consumers. We're the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
Narrator: Martha Stewart.
Tyler: F' Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man. So f' off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let's evolve, let the chips fall where they may. But that's me, and I could be wrong, maybe it's a terrible tragedy.
Narrator: Nah, it's just stuff...My insurance is probably gonna cover it, so...What?
Tyler: The things you own end up owning you.
Even as I read this, checking the context of how what I am quoting fits into the point I am making, I realize the truth (barring the slam on IKEA- I will always support Scandinavian Imports, esp. IKEA). The truth is, the cause of my stagnation, my stress, my high blood pressure, my pacing back and forth in my mind, my little hamster scratching and running in circles while maintaining the smiling professional face- the cause is my slow cooking in a pot of the false paradigm of the world. I act like this is all there is, all that matters, all that will ever be. Whether I make it to Colonel or Manager or Professor, someone, someday will say, time to take down those old dusty pictures of guys in outmoded glasses and ancient ties and store them in the archives. All this stuff every day we worry about, yes, we must live in this world, but we must not reject that part of us that is extraordinary. Someone a long time ago, pulled a fast one over on the human race and told a lot of us this is all there is, and this arena is all that matters. It's just dust man, just dust (as some beatnick poet probably said). Just as Religion is a Paradigm that needs to be undone (Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion. William Blake), so also does the Paradigm of the world.
(Really, any paradigm is bad- I recently visited the Gingko Biloba Petrified Forest in WA State, close to Yakima, a barren desert region of WA. It is the only place in the world where there are petrified Gingko Biloba trees, fossilized thousands and thousands of years ago. Gingko Biloba's effect on humans is increased mental ability and alertness, and the sign said, aside from careful cultivation by Chinese Monks in monasteries, the Gingko would have become extinct. There are no natural Gingkos left in the world except those carefully nurtured by people. I stood there on that hill, surrounded by broken huge trunks of stone, and I looked at three Gingko trees that were a gift from a monastery as their leaves rustled in the wind off the Columbia river. The thought hit me that while the petrified wood was amazing, impressive, and overwhelmingly solid in its permanence- these ruins were just rock, representations of the three fragile trees I saw in front of me. I would trade those three trees now than all the petrified perfection of the forest that once was thousands of years ago. Likewise, in our life, would we rather not live a day in total reality without pretense, then decades of distracted diversion, pursuing some goal of petrification of a moment of perfection in our life? Anyway, I digress, although that is a good digression.)
My point is, we are all traveling this path. It's just that some of us are sleepwalking and others are fighting to stay awake- so while we are traveling on our way, there will be ups and downs, good scenery and bad scenery, good companions and bullies, but what MATTERS is our STATE of BEING. We CHOOSE our state of being. Sometimes the choice comes easy, when the light is just right and the wind is coming off the hill through the beech trees bringing the smell of the river, anyone can write poetry. But when we are trudging in the cold rain or in the hot sun with nothing to drink, that is when our STATE of BEING going down the proverbial toilet.
I think that my creativity is strongest when I am experiencing suffering in my life. It helps me get through my issues, and I reach deep into the well of life to articulate my hope and the way to my next mountain top. When I stop suffering, or I finally, "Get things right", that's when my stress, my hamster treadmill starts up and bam! there goes my creativity. Buddhism, Sufis, and many other simple belief systems are clear in teaching that within the ordinary, mundane life is where you find the mystical, the magical and the sacred- the jewel hidden in flower of the heart. That is the true reality- not some earthshaking fire on a mountain, although every once and awhile that happens too.
What happens is the false Paradigm of the World overwhelms us with bureaucratic minutae that suck our bandwidth like vampires, kill us slowly in a death by a thousand mundane cuts. It makes us believe that the MUNDANE IS ALL THERE IS. That there is no magic in finding three living gingko biloba trees living in a forest of shattered petrified trees off the dusty road to crass and common Yakima Training Center. It is the paradigm that makes us go into movies for "a fix" to our starved subconscious/unconscious, and upon exit shake off the ideas that percolated, dismissing it all as fantasy and fiction. It is the paradigm that announces that all the miracles have already occured, that the divine spirit has said everything it wants to say, and if you want to hear from God its contained in quotation marks followed by a numerical marker and the name of an ancient scribe.
I challenge the paradigm and all paradigms. Life is is alive; its not a statue but an organism. This life is not a asphalt road engineered for smooth driving but a flowing river that cuts through the hardest granite. I believe that if the Creator stops speaking, if every archangel and seraphim did not whisper over every blade of grass, every atom, nerve, and fiber: "live, move, act!" all reality would wink out- so I think its the height of silliness to argue its all there complete in a book. The bottomline up front is that we have a life to live, and we can't fetter it by ideas or actions other than we could limit the sky.
I'm not saying we need to walk around in Never never land, but we have to live like folks unplugged from the Matrix. Reality isn't pretty, but the world is still an exciting place, and you have to wrestle it to the ground like an angel if you want the real thing. Our mission is to show kindness to others and to the things around us, and to set others free. It's really pretty simple.
Suffering is key though, and really, there is no suffering when you actually choose to go through it. And the suffering doesn't have to be an incredible ordeal- the process of everyday life can be bad enough when it goes on interminably without significant changes or evolution. Once we accept the suffering, the process still occurs, but our acceptance and transcendence pushes us through. It becomes a verb instead of a noun, and it causes us to grow, and more than survive, it teaches us to evolve. Otherwise, the immersion in everyday life without a constant tether to the other world leads to a slow drowning of the soul. In Fight Club, Tyler makes himself face reality:
Tyler: Stay with the pain, don't shut this out...Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing...Stop it, this is your pain, it's right here...What you're feeling is pre-mature enlightenment...This is the greatest moment of your life man and you're off somewhere missing it...First you have to give up, first you have to know, not fear, know that someday you're gonna die. It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
We need an umbilical cord to the beautiful and the extraordinary, and like a grub morphing into a dragonfly, we need to experience the death of our paradigm of the world before we can wake to the Real one.
I feel like I've been babbling a little, but, like I said, I haven't blogged in awhile so I'm out of practice. While nothing can be sustained indefinitely (On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival rate drops to Zero F.C.), with a little dedication and effort and sometimes a little help, a lot of things can endure, like the Gingko Biloba tree. Sometimes its a matter of cutting through our own crap and just making things happen. Case in point, a good friend of mine, Matt Birch, asked me to write a poem for his friends' anniversary. I've been trying for 6 months to come up with the perfect poem, that I haven't written a poem at all. I think I'll just write it, and however it turns out, it'll be okay. At least It'll be written.
Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
William Blake
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