Without my artistic passion, I’d be a less happy guy. But being an artist isn’t just a source of joy; it’s companionship. When I’m not in an intimate relationship, the passion of creativity keeps my juices flowing, and occupied in the creation of beauty.
Deep creativity shares energetic space with making love. In his book The Soul’s Code, author and archetypal psychologist James Hillman mentions a French writer, who, every time he ejaculated would lamentably proclaim, “Damn, there goes another book!” Whether it’s making a poem, or banging out one of my many heartfelt prose projects (more likely these days), engaging in the creative act and leaves me deeply satisfied and fulfilled. And when I’m not with a woman, it eases my sexual desire.
Creativity is a kind of otherness. Whether the poet’s muse or that ineffable source of inspiration, engaging in the creative act is a relationship. While it’s likely this relationship is merely between different aspects of our own psyche, and not with something “out there,” it has an I-Thou feeling to it. As any artist knows, it’s a deeply moving experience. Frustrating and even despairing at times, but just like any meaningful relationship, being creative is to consort with wildness and beauty itself.
We all need companionship. A creative discipline is one way to connect, to relate, to something that feels like more than our small, merely logical selves. I find creativity to be an indispensable part of my life. Not only does it provide relationship when other of my relationships struggle, it helps me work through those challenges. Creativity also connects me to my body, to my unconscious, to my dreams, and most importantly, to the heart of the world. Creativity helps me sort through my thoughts and feelings, return a sense of flow, and to integrate the disparate parts of body and mind. Metaphor, images, and mirror neurons replicating and processing the world around us join us with the rest of humanity and the primal impulses of the natural world—with storms, hidden lagoons and deep forests, sweeping meadows, and other dynamics of our sparkling and darkening planet. Creativity is meditation in motion.
Creativity has been my lover my whole life. She has never abandoned me but once, but then came back, because my arms and heart remained open, which they always have been even when I’ve collapsed. Every day we dance. We tango, waltz, and boogie. We fall down too. And sometimes, we just lie on the floor together, silently staring, or doing our own thing, apart yet connected. That’s when the best poems are born! The gestation I’ve come to regard as much as actively making love. We are connected even when the lights of intimacy seem to have dimmed. For, as I once penned, most of my poems are made when I’m not writing them.
Many think creativity is what we make; they are mesmerized by the works of an artist. That’s important too! But every artist knows much more than this—the invigorating wilderness of the unknown, the invisible and fertile realm of inspiration (even on the darkest days) that makes us more whole, and even when we have nothing to show for it but showing up more fully and messily ourselves. Creativity: the courtship, the love, the full embrace that can’t quite replace human romance. Yet that also can’t be replaced, especially not by a human lover.
Image: Nymphainna AB https://pixels.com/profiles/ainna-bosch/shop
