Lifeletter #120: The Sacred Encounter

So at the end of the day we give thanks,

for being betrothed to the unknown.

John O’Donahue

 

Do you have a longing to be more creative? Is there an impulse, or a whisper that keeps asking you to express your creative energy? I am meeting more and more people who have a deep desire to engage in some kind of creative activity. The way they speak to me about this longing is deeply moving; it’s not just a small thing. This creative impulse is something deep and strong-it is not leaving them alone. There’s an urgency here that is finding its own voice.

So what is going on? Did you ever wonder about this? It appears that this desire is being activated in our collective consciousness right now. And that perhaps it’s about more than just a personal creative impulse. Perhaps this creative energy is no longer a luxury. What if it is a necessity? What if we need to awaken our creative intelligence in order to respond to the intensity of our global crisis?

I speak to people every day who want to claim a space for themselves, in which they can call forth their authentic creativity. There is often a deep sense that this creative space is sacred, that the engagement with this energy is a sacred encounter.

And yet, I also hear about how difficult it is to claim this space. How full life is, how impossible it seems to be to find the time to slow down and open to what wants to emerge. A woman named Mirabai Starr, a scholar and teacher, tells a great story about what she realized when she was speaking to the head nun of a convent about the contemplative life.

Mirabai was expressing a great longing for the peace, the quiet and the solitude of the life inside the convent. She was feeling that if she could retreat in this way, she could claim a space for herself in which she could do the things she really wanted to do, the things that were in alignment with her heart and soul. She was going on and on about how complex her life was, how full, how overwhelming, how unpredictable. The head nun listened for a while, and then she burst out laughing.

“Oh my dear, you don’t understand,” she said to Mirabai. “It’s just like that in here. We don’t sit around praying and singing all day long. We have work, we have schedules, we have relationships with each other, we have politics and rough edges and difficulties too. This is human life. You can’t get away from it.”

We can’t get away from it. There is nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. I asked a woman I was working with this week, “What kind of conditions are you placing on your life, before you claim this sacred creative space of your own?” She realized as we explored that question, that she was waiting until her life opened up and offered her more space and time. When she was able to face the fact of her own passivity, she began to see that she had to actually claim this space for herself, from a core place in her own being.

So what stops us? What stops you, what stops me from doing that? If I really want this sacred encounter with all of my heart, what is the story I am telling myself about why I cannot claim this space and time for myself?

I don’t want to fill this open space of inquiry, the space I am offering you right now, with a lot of answers. This is a question that deserves your loving attention, if you are interested in this sacred encounter with your own creativity. I’d really like to encourage you, if you are willing, to live with this question, to embrace it, to make it your friend.

To finish, I’ll just drop a few clues into the field. I notice how messy the creative process is, how challenging it can be, how much courage it requires. How much stumbling and flailing around it requires, how much experimentation, how much deep learning. There is a great deal of destruction inside the creative process! It doesn’t matter what the form of it is: painting, photography, inquiry, meditation, writing, singing or dancing. There are many different dimensions of creativity. On the deepest level, creativity is simply a way of being. You can see this if you study Pablo Picasso’s life. He wasn’t only creative when he was in front of the canvas. His whole life was on fire, was devoted to that sacred encounter. He used to say,

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

The truth is, I’m not in control when I give myself over to the flow of this energy. The source of my creative energy is a vast open space, an unknown place. Each time I honour this creative impulse, I have to open to something much bigger than I am. Something vast and unknown. This is the nature of the sacred encounter. It carries me beyond what I know, beyond my familiar identity.

Perhaps we have a great deal more resistance to this than we know?

 

The Real Work

 It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

 and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

 The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

 The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 Wendell Berry

 

with love

Shayla