I’ve been out of rhythm with my creative projects. The fact of this looms larger every time I sit down to write, and my scattered feeling grows.
For a while, my motto was Show up and get out of the way. I still like this for its simplicity. If I come to the blank page and let go, the words come through me. And yet it’s not always as simple as it sounds.
Creativity, to me, is something outside of myself that I must slow down and orient to, like a compass needle feeling for true north. Sometimes I can jump easily from the mundane events of the day into writing.
Sometimes, though, it takes minutes, hours, to reorient. I remind myself that though I often write quickly, I can’t create at the zip-zip! pace of my Gemini-moon thoughts. I need to close my tabs. Quit my email. Ignore my phone. I must let the dog be slightly disappointed in me. I have to slip into the crevice between ordinary thoughts. I have to slow my pace.
The world takes on a different luster when my creativity is “turned on.” A goldfinch singing in a pine becomes a grace note to a story’s setting. The band I watch playing could be the cousins of characters I dreamed up, and their songs gain a haunting quality that takes me straight down a pathway to a story’s heart.
Perhaps, when that creative flow is dulled, I’m simply not paying as much attention. The rattle of thoughts in my head drowns out the rest of the world. No one ever got particularly inspired by making lists of things they need to do!
At times it feels as if I have to physically wrench myself out of the ordinary pace of life. I force myself to sit and slow down to the rhythm of my breathing. Watch the wind toss the pine branches. Actually hear the goldfinches singing.
When I do that, words bubble up. I don’t know if they’re brilliant. They might not shift your thinking or transform your heart, but it doesn’t matter. They’re there to be expressed.
Time shifts, too. Every spiritual-leaning text from the last ten years or so will tell you about the movement from Chronos time to Kairos time, a.k.a. “deep time.” I think it is a sensory process. The world becomes sweeter and richer. You can taste it; your sense of smell deepens; suddenly your dull, human ears become attuned to sound on a deeper level than they were ten minutes ago. Everything in this world has a capacity to move you in a way that it didn’t when you were simply going about your day.
You’ve stepped into a place of wonder, or awe. Sometimes it’s rage or grief that lives in this place, too. This soft, stretchy time can hold it all. It waits for us to come back to it. It is always there, when we’re ready to slow down and remember.
Sometimes I need to ask for help to get to this place. Whether it’s a whisper to one of the beloved dead or a saint (not much difference there), or the force of creativity itself, releasing my problems to a higher power can bring me back into rhythm with myself and my work.
So, tell me—how do you enter your creative process? How do you deepen your experience of time?
P.S. Go create something! Your emails will always be there when you’re done. :)