Respite (and Channelling the Sheer Content of the Muse)
Is our human structure big enough to handle the arrival of spoken dreams?
Time to slow down to the speed of the journal, which has quickly become my favourite facet of the day. Even the new ramen place we discovered in town, with that dollop of rindy pork they cake on top of the soup, cannot compete with the quiet ecstasy - the alignment - I feel as I prioritise my days to write. I am charged by this practice: that daemonic fire erupted so fully inside me yesterday that I even wrote an extra post, for fun.
I awoke today with a novel coming through. I’ve already written down the spine, main characters, possible endings. It is, yes, deep enough a theme. It has, yes, dynamics and locations I know intimately from my life. It is, also, urgent and timely, given the situation of culture, the precariousness of the world. I might, just, do it. It feels overwhelming though, this stream of muse-inspiration into my body. I wonder if my structure can handle it: all the plot’s permutations, all the possibilities of prose. All the research corridors I’ll need to head down, in order to make such a novel loyal to the truth. Like any real life-changing dream a person fantasises of — the million-dollar account, the dream-partner, the ticket to ride — I’ve been talking big smack about being a writer, but do I really want the job when it lands? Am I open to the loss of self such a fully-fledged creative vortex might impose?
It now strikes me as wise that I keep my coaching practice open a little bit, to offer structure, normality, an in-touchness with the world. Like handrails as you descend into a kind of swimming pool without bottom, to keep tabs with a group of clients, a group of explorers, brings sanity and structure to the insanity of the artist’s world. Coaching is the masculine counterpart to my creative feminine, and as we all know, lives move forward only amidst a happy marriage. More than ever I anticipate our new nine-month Legacy course. I’m thinking of slowing down Mastery too: same material, extensively over the same nine months, too.
My thoughts run out: brief respite. I look at the screen in delight. Those moments are delicious when thoughts come to an end.
I had a sort of spiritual insight some ten days or so ago. I was sitting up at Elephant Café, overlooking the blistering green Campuhan Ridge below, and I was struggling to do justice to the afternoon text I’d set out to write. There is still a self-flagellating part within me, a drive toward productivity, and he is not happy if I don’t make progress in a work session, if I don’t get something worth doing done.
But he ran out of steam, this productivity-obsessed part of me, and all of my words dried up. I could self-flagellate now, I thought to myself, I hit none of my aims this work afternoon. Yet instead I realised what a wonderful thing it is to stop writing, to run out of ideas, to lose grip of anything to produce. For when I run out of all things to do, where am I left but in the depths of meditation? And I walked, head-empty to the last, along the verdant green of that Campuhan Ridge, among the crickets and the buzzards and the setting pink sun, and there was nothing else to think in this world.
* * *
Palm tree sways in the clear blue sky
Half moon nascent ten miles high
Her ink-black hair curls down to the thigh:
— On y va! On y va!
* *
The urge to write; the urge to not-write.
Therein lies liberation.
*
And on saying that, I’m back there now.