Creativity | Consciousness
Are You Sacrificing Your Soul to the Scroll?
Automation versus creation
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time,” Upstream: Selected Essays
From stillness and listening arises clarity. Not much clarity, mostly. But enough and exactly what’s needed for now.
One small speck of knowing glimmering amidst the impossible field of unknowingness. Refracted through the prism that we call this body, this mind, this soul.
Ours for a moment, shaped from nothingness.
Having quieted our doings — having rested from the naming of things and proclamation of me and mine — we make the invitation that we’re not really “making” at all.
We make the invitation when, in truth, there is no “making” of anything.
There is a field. We are in it. We open to what wants to pass through…or we do not.
Mostly, we do not. We numb and distract and activate and pontificate.
We sacrifice our lives and our souls to the endless scroll. We click and double tap and make Gods out of metaphor.
Losing the plot line. Losing…everything.
But this is important, we say. This is responsibility and respectability and security and justice.
No. It is not.
It is more of the same.
Letting go of that sameness — stepping out of automation and into boundless creation — is why you are here.
Gathering the courage to create from this place — to create from a place of stillness, listening, and clarity — is to claim your original voice in the concert of things.
“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot.
My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything.”
— Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time,” Upstream: Selected Essays
Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here:
