Facing the Dark Side …

I’m not suggesting that one has to live in the ghetto and ride a skateboard into the forties to be creative. I’m simply suggesting that in order to drop in to the rhythm of one’s creative self, one must have the courage to meet one’s own soul. And usually it’s just not something that generally tends to be happening on Wall Street.

The dark side of creativity requires one to shrug off status quo modes of operation—to refrain from the habitual tendency to split off into segregated parts of oneself: mind/body, sad/happy, on/off. To be creative, one must be willing to truly drag the whole Self through the muck. To gain the experience. To live it without armor. To live inside the body. Embodiment, ensoulment at all costs. Instead of naming and medicating the split off condition at hand, one accepts it as part of the whole self. Moves with it. Owns it. To be creative one must be willing to feel the pain, the burn, and the discomfort of being Ensouled. Carl Jung, prophet seer of the twentieth century noticed,

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better!”

The dark side of creativity involves a face-to-face encounter with all the muck, heartbreak, pain, emotional disappointment, and fatigue that would naturally counter and balance the overall rapture and Exaltation of a life infused by meaning. The problem for most is that we want the rapture without the rest. We’d like to leap frog over the dark aspects of the creative cycle and arrive at the creative self. But it doesn’t work. False and unattractive, it looks immediately low on the scale of authenticity and it smells something like Paris Hilton.

Whether you’re a singer looking for sound, a writer looking for voice, or a surfer looking to catch a wave, in daily life we must all begin to embody more and more of these limited moments on earth. To actually be there. Jeannette Winterson, one of my favorite authors, puts it this way, “I realize now that the past does not dissolve like a mirage. I realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy—speed-of-light-power—to break that gravitational pull.”

And this is why we end up, more times than not, sitting our asses on the couch with those knitting needles. It’s just a metaphor, really. I have nothing truly against knitting or its needles. I’m just saying that it’s time now to wake up a little more, Stand Up, stare the darkness down, and create the present moment. Go on. Get up. Stare it down. Swallow. Dive. Dig up the meaning for your life.