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This article originally appeared on my personal blog, Clinsights, here.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from the original post. You can always read the entire post here.
We are sharing this essay in The BoldBrush Letter because, though it applies primarily to writers, the underlying idea applies to all artists. Please enjoy.
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On to today’s article….
The ordinary world conspires to deny you creative freedom. If you’re waiting for the ‘right time’ to create, it will never arrive. Creative time doesn’t arise out of chaos. You must construct a sacred prison for yourself to separate yourself from the everyday.
The Muses love to confuse us with paradoxes and so, in a Cosmic joke, we find that creative freedom arises best in captivity – the captivity of routine work in solitude.
When you create for yourself a cell of solitary confinement in which you do your work, you become a daily prisoner who hopes for the warden, The Muse, to walk by and say something.
The irony of such a prison cell is that it provides you with the temporal white space that allows you to think without distractions.
And once you allow your mind to forget the mundane, it vibrates at a higher level and transforms your ‘prison’ into the holy place of creation where no talking is allowed.
You enter the temple, your silent studio, and only you, the high priest of your practice, is allowed entry into the holy of holies – your mind.
And there, when the Muse alights, you are, through the Ark of the Covenant in your mind, empowered to re-enter Eden where the Cherubim hand you the power of the flaming sword, the logos and you commune with God as a co-creator.
“I will put my law in their minds” – Jeremiah 31:31
This sacred sanctum is the time and place where you pour out your soul before God and tell him what you have learned to be true, what hurts you, what gives you joy, what inspires you, and most importantly, just who are you, really?
Having re-entered Eden, God once again in-spires, “breathes life” into you, and you pour it out in front of Him – that is creation.
Creation is a pouring out of your soul. Re-creation is a gathering, a pouring in, a filling up, a force of attraction.
Re-creation is what happens when you go out there into the world and you fill up your soul with experience, both good and bad; both painful and joyful. You overcome your fear and go forth into the messy Bella Chaos of the world.
Having poured yourself out completely before God during your last trip into Eden, you are empty. And you cannot give what you have not yet received.
You are no longer the being you used to be, so you must re-create yourself so that you may once again have something to offer as you enter the solitary confinement of your inner sanctum where you, again, pour it all out onto the altar and, once again, you and God will co-create something in your image.
To create something worthwhile, you must give something of yourself.
So you got out into the world, and you fill yourself up with scenes, relationships, observations and emotions.
Then you create and then, again, re-create yourself, over and over. Experience then create, experience then create.
It dawns on me that these two essential activities – experience then create – are the reason that in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way she has only two activities that are non-negotiable: The weekly artist date (re-creation) and The Morning Pages (creation).
What I have outlined here is the gist of the creative life and the reason we are here. And each time you muster the courage to go through the cycle again, the size of your soul stretches just a little bit more.
“Freedom finds itself in captivity.
Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy
are where the imagination goes to die,
or so I’ve found.”
— Nick Cave
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Posts Referenced in this Reflection
Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clintavo, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek. I do use AI to create relevant images to go with my writing as the images are orthogonal to the writing itself and I am not an illustrator.
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Creatively,
Clint Watson
FASO Founder
Creativity Fanatic
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