Destroy/Create

My assumptions are the enemy of my creativity. 

It takes away all power of the imagination and the allowance for change to occur because I've set an idea in my mind of how it's going to turn out. No matter how it is in the end it's the worst thing I  have ever done because I've taken away the very essence of creativity for me, the ability to be inspired by the process. 

But I've been thinking lately, what is inspiration? Why do we have it some days and on others we can't seem to make it work for us no matter what we do? I think inspiration might be make believe. We have to make ourselves believe in it and practice it to be able to access it. Maybe just like hope or patience, or even love, your inspiration is a muscle. You have to use it everyday to make it stronger.

 Nothing has meaning until you give it meaning. Until you decide to care about something, to give it use, it has no meaning to you. Just like a pen and paper sitting on the desk don't mean anything to you until you have use of them. Only when you care do they have meaning in your life.

 Everything that inspires you is giving you a new idea and sparking an old one that you've had in you all along, that you just needed to be reminded of.  I can either allow that to inspire me to do new things and destroy old ways of thinking about creativity or discourage me from even trying. 

Most of the time I have to get out all the things I think I need to say so what's actually important can come out. I guess most people would simply call this drafting and editing but it's not quite the same for me. There comes a point after I've written a couple hundred words when things start to feel different. It's like my words are no longer mine... Or like my humaness is not so evident. I have no other agenda and I have nothing left of me that I think I need to say and what's real is finally right there in front of me, I know what needs to be said and I am merely a vessel. 

I used to think I was empty but I was so far from it. I was full of fear and hate and I didn't understand how I could feel so empty yet so full of darkness. I was so full of it all that I couldn't hold anything good. But everything is different now and I understand what it really means to be empty. 

Rumi talks about the reed flute being completely empty but still making beautiful music because of the breath that is blown through it. This being empty is not to know such a deep isolating emptiness that is full of loneliness and fear, but to be truly empty and have the ability to be a vessel for something as great as the breath that gives us life, to never be too full so that you can't take in more. 

I am an empty vessel, able to communicate great things. But in order to do that I have to be empty of things that take up too much room, like ego and hate, fear and anger.  This is not an easy thing for me, but in that I understand that there is always room for the lessons that fear teaches me about truth and understanding. 

"Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness." -Ram Dass

I have spent days holding onto my unworthiness and thinking that I had no creation left. Thinking surely my muses had left me. 

"Fool!" Said my muse to me, "look in thy heart and write." -Philip Sydney

I've wasted so much time thinking that I had nothing to say and not being willing to wake up and see what was right in front of me. That I always have what I need and I'm as inspired as I allow myself to be.

"There is nothing to writing. You simply sit down at a typewriter and bleed." -Ernest Hemmingway

But then it was like something snapped inside me and as if I was a bottle being dropped and shattered I let go of everything I thought I knew because those things weren't really the truth. I became the breaker and the broken open and I could finally see.

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -Jack London

 I thought if I wanted to write, things would just come to me but that isn't the case. My assumptions of how things were going to be ruined me from the start. I always have to destroy in order to create. When I stopped thinking about it, not only did I do it, I became it and I then understood why everything happened the way it did for me.

Creativity for me is the process of breaking open and becoming whole again, over and over. Destroying to create. The very thing that breaks me open often puts me back together. It's a release of everything that I am and ever have been and an adding on to who I am right now and one day will become. I used to talk about this place I didn't know how else to describe besides being "There". The place where I would feel good... Whole and like a person with their head screwed on straight. At first I never thought I'd get there, then I thought it would just be a place I would always be looking to, to motivate me to be better but now I realize it's here right now. It's been here all along. 

 I'm there. It's happening now.