Un-clutching my Clutch of Ideas
Brood patches, creativity, pregnancy, and stale Halloween candy
I’m starting to pop back in from leave, but taking it slow. I hope you’ve enjoyed some of the archives and the Curious Seeds interviews in the meantime. Thank you for being here!
This weekend I joined an hourlong leadership workshop on self-awareness. Kind of a funny time to do that since I’m probably the least self-aware and most other-aware that I’ve been in my life (caring for a newborn).
I’m experiencing that everything — hunger, bodily needs, old ways of working and being, vanity, ego, relationships, laundry, calls and texts, etc. — takes a backseat to the beautiful, endless, gurgling needs of a brand new earthling. Like being swallowed up by faith or an ecstatic experience.
Nevertheless, I showed up on mute, camera off, a squeaking baby on my chest.
We were invited to reflect on a place we’re stuck right now then dig in to find the tap root of the obstacle: the limiting beliefs.
I immediately thought of the pages of ideas I’ve been generating for many, many months — for workshops, yoga classes, essays, theories, dharma talks, lectures, multi-sensory experiences, solo art shows (LOL what?) — that have become imprisoned in my notebooks or my brain, stuck in 2-D.
I find myself all wrapped up, restricted from full expression by the tethers of reinforcing limited beliefs:
My creativity is a scarce and limited resource so
I need to guard, horde, and save my ideas until
They’re good enough and I can ensure public execution of them will result in perfection, including the most visibility and external validation as possible.
I’m sharing them here, with you, to air them out. Beginning to pull them out as if they were splinters cozy under my skin. To be honest, open, and…eventually…accountable.
Now, not all ideas are good ideas, obviously. And not every good idea will or should see the light. 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage; Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you. There’s a bittersweetness to this truth.
The novelist Lauren Groff threw an entire (long hand) unpublished manuscript into a bonfire because, “this isn’t going to work,” and has said giving up on ideas isn’t failure, but practice. I wholeheartedly agree.
And yet.
I’m talking not talking about every idea ever, but about those that come to you, which you somehow know should be hatched — you know there’s something there. They stay with you, haunt or bowl you over, or they just really really hit you deep. But you stifle them with fear or vanity or over-thinking. You cloister them when that idea was not asking to be a nun! There are ideas that are meant to pass through you and out into the world, if only you didn’t get in the way. You know those ideas?
For me, there’s a feeling of lightness and giddiness when I know I’ve been chosen as a channeler for something that feels exquisite and effervescent. Liz Gilbert writes about this in Big Magic. When I know, in my bones, this is a good idea. And even if you’re wrong, which you could be, the stakes are never as high as you think. There’s an argument for expressing your creativity in order to make way for whatever’s next - keep that pipeline clean. Rick Rubin writes about this in The Creative Act (or as I like to call it, Big Magic with a Beard). You know those ideas?
Incidentally, I spent the last year doing mostly two things:
Generating / cultivating / expressing ideas: I launched this newsletter, joined writing groups, undertook deep creative alchemical work in groups and in one-on-one coaching; I painted, taught yoga classes, gave dharma talks, I wrote a lot publicly about my own thoughts, and dutifully shared all of it out into the world.
Conceiving / growing / birthing a human: Trying to get pregnant is perhaps the ultimate terrifying public creative pursuit. I worked very long and hard to become pregnant, and then almost just as hard to stay pregnant. Then giving birth was also grueling.
I didn’t really mean for it to be so, but my creativity and my creating became complementary, interwoven arcs, each one amplifying the other. They were each vulnerable, at times excruciating, exhilarating, and deeply worthwhile pursuits.
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