Facing the Dark Side …

Everyone wants to be creative, at least ideally. To employ the imagination and navigate the unknown in order to bring forth something new into existence. Rapture. The feeling of total immersion into a project whereas time itself begins to expand and life, afterall, has meaning. Life has meaning. To be creative is to lose oneself to some greater vision or calling and thereby be freed. Freed. And, perhaps it is in these moments when we find ourselves closer to the experience of love than we have ever been before—and without the necessity of a partner.

So if creativity is such a highly prized experience for the human being, why would we ever settle for some mundane existence, chewing vacantly on other people’s ideas in a vast world that is seemingly barren of personal meaning?

Cardboard people eating cardboard in a cardboard world.

Though we may aspire towards the creative genius and depth of such artists as Virginia Wolf, Anais Nin, or Georgia O’Keefe, somehow we end up, more times than not, knitting scarves in our living room and realizing, as we go, that this has been our greatest creative expression to date. What is it that holds us back and keeps us from participating in the grand experience? I’ve thought long about it. The truth is that creativity has a dark side that not everyone wants to live through.

Dropping into the creative realm requires that we meet ourselves in the darkest of places. Imagine great currents of energy running through the body, and unless you can learn to ride them, as a surfer rides a wave through cold waters unflinchingly, you might just find yourself back home, on Prozac, with the knitting needles. Pummeled. The wave closes overhead. Feet still aboard. Breathing. Cold. Feet still aboard. And you ride, meeting the moment with presence. And if you’re going through hell—your own personalized psycho-physical tsunami nightmare, you’re meeting it still.

To be creative is to be insistent on being whole in a world that asks for nothing more than safe and accepted modes of compliance and dissociation. Easier said than done. I mean, we can hardly accept the throes of creativity in our significant others. Every girl in online dating will say that she wants her man to be “creative”—full of new and exciting ideas, artistic, on the cutting edge. But when it comes to marriage, how many would opt for the safe and stable salesman over the stormy and moreover chaotic artist, spinning soul.