Rob Brezsny recently shared this Rainer Maria Rilke quote:
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
Regardless of your expertise, your resources and your genius, if you are innovating or inventing, you are likely to (frequently) feel as if you don't know what you're doing.
This is partially because you have chosen the pathless path, but it is also because our educational and philosophical frameworks are linear in nature, and creativity is more like tending to a patch of wildflowers.
Part of the work is admiration.
Part of the work is curiosity for what could be.
Part of the work is the courage to fail.
And then the work of admiration comes again.
Learning to admire the failure, because at its root is courage.
In the wilderness of creativity:
You can garden, you can cultivate, but in the end there lies a soil beneath you that you cannot see. This unseen soil is collaborating with you at all times. And the ways you've been taught to see and demarcate the world (via school and cultural convention), unconsciously asks you to create boxes and lines around things to make them feel more organized.
And this feeling of organization is a good feeling, but it cuts out what cannot be boxed in. And so, the soil is left without its creative capacity for everything and anything, and a part of you is left out, too.
We have been taught to avoid the unseen world and the feelings it gives us when we engage with it. It won't yield anything quickly, and it certainly can't be controlled or measured. Intimacy with this unseen world - I believe - was once innate. The tools to sit within it aren't the biohacks we see on the internet or the revelations of modern psychology, but instead a sense of remembrance that lies with our most ancient ancestry.
We forgot that the earth is in the cosmos, and that the cosmos and nature are one in the same. We forgot that we are both the solid ground and the vast unknown in which our home planet resides. We are all of this.
And so uncertainty is who we are.
We are seated within it and were seeded within it.
When we fear uncertainty, we actually fear ourselves.
And that is a difficult truth to embrace.
But embrace is what alchemizes fear into the most luminous remembrance that we are the everything…
And that the order that exists in the everything doesn't require us to shave off anything to feel a sense of peace.
If you're interested in exploring intimacy with creative chaos and the fertility of uncertainty, join me and Arizona Smith for
Holy Mess.
