Clouds and rain soothe this parched landscape today, having us wonder as we awake just how much rain it would take to extinguish all these fires currently burning across many spots in these western US states.

Last night we wandered up a trail, an almost forgotten place underneath I-90, deep in a canopy of 100-to-200 foot tall trees, where waterfalls hid. On the way back to the car, the darkness was almost fully complete, and I moved like a snail while Colleen bounded through the root-lain land like a wild cat, agile and fierce and strikingly beautiful.

At the car, the aliveness and joy were palpable, a thriving pulse of aliveness. Those smiles from the authentic wild self can last for days.

There was a thread inside me this morning, when I sat gazing at the moistened land, that has now wandered off down some invisible trail…which is funny and also terrifying. Again?! Where did the muse go? Yet that deep fickleness to my creative process is such a teacher, as it asks me over and over, what really is creativity?

There are textbook definitions which are as helpful mud, or the cultural definition/confusion that only proper arts (e.g., painting, drawing, sculpture, etc) belong. I do not subscribe as such dogmas suggest to me that where our culture has lost the plot. I, too, have lost the plot, many times.

Experiential creativity, the everyday creativity (Richards, 2018) which is meaningful and original, where we detune from logic and retune to the material at hand, this feels more real. Here we arrive at something which is approachable to each of us, across the vast domains of our humyn and earth-embodied lives…

like running into the dark without a light

where the felt-sense of vitality thrives

This is the dance, what Ceremony in all its myriad forms is really all about. I am remembering some moments…

I am walking on the land, a medicine walk in the midst of my most recent 4-day, 4-night fast. I hear/feel/am-touched by a quiet whisper: 'go left.' I do, and then keep following this whisper which has no voice but is also there, and not me. A few more minutes, and I stop. At my feet is this:

Another moment...

I have taken myself on a solo canoe medicine walk. I swam out while pulling it, as fast as I could into the very cold lake, and then traveled on the reflections of light on water. Eventually, I am by this shore where the creek comes in, and busy making something. I don't really know what it will be, but I am  extremely focused for an hour. When I finally look up, to examine my creation, just beyond the tip of this emergent ceremonial art but 12 miles away in the distance is the most incredible rainbow I have ever seen: a block of color light in the sky exactly where the tip is pointing .

The key in all of this, just like last night's wandering run, is that if I do not open myself to this mystery, if I am not out there exploring the edge between the known and unknown, it will not show itself. The great mystery comes in that dance, that interplay, an emergent greeting and prayer of wild creativity.

Even more critically, the difference between everyday creativity and the culture allegiance to creativity as product has to do with the infiltration of meaning into such objects and not the objects themselves. This is where we, as citizens and aspects of this larger culture, have both lost the plot and where we can re-find it.

What returns in us can–-if we go there, if we let it–-open us into a way of seeing and being which holds creativity in every movement. To me, such an awareness decentralizes the productions and technologies from our culture and substrates of our thoughts and returns us to the innate, wild, dynamic, and colorful aliveness that is our embodiment on this wild earth. Or, simpler, it is the root of our crazy wisdom (Trungpa, 2001).

References

Richards, R. (2018). Everyday creativity and the healthy mind: Dynamic new paths for self and society. Palgrave Macmillan.

Trungpa, C. (2001). Crazy wisdom. Shambhala Publications.