Shadow Play

Last night, as I was trying (and failing) to write, I kept getting distracted by the light and shadows mingling on my wall. That's one of my favorite aspects about this otherwise dark-ass apartment, it's low so that the streetlights create a tapestry of beautiful shadows around the entire house that I get to play around in.

So, seeing as inspiration was not forthcoming, I decided to ditch the writing and take out my camera. Lately, I've been mounting an opposition against the Inner Tyrant, and while it may sound cute, it's not at all easy. It is, as Jung might suggest, a very primal sort of conflict, after all, one between the Animus and my conscious light-of-day persona.

My Inner Tyrant expects to lay order. Is deeply creative, but presumes to mechanize it. There needs to be, in order to fight the rigor, an embracing of chaos. I've been trying to integrate the intuitive, the female aspects of trusting my own inner rhythm with this more overt need to control and lay order down. That means trusting that the chaotic, haphazard rhythm that my soul wants to live in has in it an order, unknown to myself, yet powerful. Meaningful.

It's quite well-known, that creative spirits tend to shun order and often, we're told that the obvious solution to that is to stop faffing about and just do things. Sometimes. Yet I've found, after a certain point, if I try to stick to too rigid an order and schedule, my creativity suffers. I remind myself I'm not meant to write under the whip of line boss. That I must stand up to Inner Tyrant, even if that means stepping out into the blizzard.

I step out.

There's an unevenness in the creative life. (That's not meant to sound pretentious, by the way. It's just what I'm noticing.) In that, seemingly little output requires copious amounts of "faffing about". Of recharge, though not in the spa-day way. More in the replenish your inner well way. You can't write if you run yourself aground.

I've found that for every page I write, a trade-off is necessary. I take thirty minutes to write a good page of words, but I take two or three hours, sometimes even an entire day, to mine the impressions and experiences that inspire it.

I feed myself with the writing of others, with sonatas and light, and music and museum visits, and dance, and random photos, and silly nonsense, and boundless sorrow, and laugh-out-loud moments. An entire canvas of "time wasting" goes into art. We like to think that's wrong, to castigate ourselves for "squandering" precious moments.

Except, with creativity, no time is really wasted, and the more I accept that, the easier my life becomes. I eliminate the guilt of "not doing anything" or indulging myself in some form or another because that, too, is valuable.

It's all valuable. It's all resources.

And valuable above all, the making of art. Even bad art. Perhaps especially. I find that the more time I spent indulging other creative outlets, like photography, drawing, or dance, the more inspired I am to write. The other week, coming home from my dancing workshop, I was scribbling away furiously on the bus in a way I haven't in years. Last night, after taking these photos, I had a fantastic swell of inspiration and set the groundwork for a new story.

The more you make, the more you want to.

It's a fascinating imbalance that gives my creativity a purpose, a rhythm, and I'm learning to walk with it (not against it).

I'm discovering this wonderful fluidity of ideas, of beauty, flowing right past me. Through me. And I'm so grateful for it.