Heartbreakthrough

I hope some day I get there fiction writing-wise:

The freedom to create is a fruit of personal growth and evolution. In the creative life cycle we pass through at least three stages: innocence (or discovery), experience (or the fall), and integration (or rejuvenation or mastery). Birth, blockage, and breakthrough. This passage is not, of course, a single and straight line; developmental phases are complexly shifting and interlooping throughout our lives.

In our original state of innocence, creativity evolved out of the child's primary creative experience of disappearing - pure absorption in free play. But eventually we experience life's battles, the long list of evils that seem to come intrinsically woven into our existence on earth, as well as the internal impedimenta of fear and judgment. Sometimes before we can reach a breakthrough to clarity we live through a dark night of the soul ... Sometimes we are able to transcend innocence-and-experience and achieve a renewed innocence. The mature artist comes back around, spiral fashion, to a state that resembles child's play [oh, I thirst, I thirst], but which has been seasoned by the terrors and trials it took to get there. At the end of the journey "costing not less than everything," writes T.S. Eliot,

We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art - Stephen Nachmanovitch

Today, with golfball neck, fighting off the latest bug that's closing off the world to me, making it small, as small as the couch (oh, Keanu), ending whatever ideas I had about what I was going to do today or this evening, today I just want to live whatever today is. Today I want to get through the day with the least amount of self-conscious awareness, the incessant Satanic drone of "What am I doing today? What am I doing today?", trying to write the script in the middle of it. I want to ride the bike instead of trying to build it (it's already there). I want to ride out today even if it's grey and embracing its greyness (oh, death).

So this is what it comes down to. Trust or no trust. Love or fear. Do I trust God enough to lay down my life, to lose it so I can gain it? Well, yes. At times. But then I pick it up again out of habit - such well-worn ruts - or fear. Fear sometimes because I know he is the god of all comfort but not the god of my comfort zone. He will invite me to go places I don't want to, internally or externally. He'll ask impossibilities of me.

But not today. Today it is impossible to do what I will be able to do on Sunday or Monday. Today has its own shape. But on Sunday or Monday, even, maybe it will be too hard to do something he asks of me and I will go away into myself where it's safe. And then I'll get bored because it's an empty safe cave because all the fun toys - love, beauty, breath, creativity, fun, joy - are in God's cave. Including myself. I'm in there too but sometimes I forget and I think I live in this small cave. I have to lose my small cave to gain my Big Cave and sometimes I hate that so much I want to spit it out of my mouth and other times I love it so much I want to wrap myself up in it and go and give it to the world.

You gave it all to the world. You - You kinda sorta rock, you know that?