Compost and Creativity

For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to embrace, explore, and express my creativity - basically, reclaim it from the clutches of academia, where creativity was encouraged, but limited to the parameters of the Chicago Manual of Style and the norms of scholarly discourse.  Since then, creativity has infused my life with newfound vitality, expansion, and imagination.  It’s propelled me toward risk and adventure.  It’s led me to new edges of self-expression.  And as with any energetic leap forward, it’s also illuminated some patterns and shadows to be processed and untangled along the way.

Productivity is one of the more consistent themes that’s come up in the process.  I often notice that when I’m unproductive in my creativity (like when I feel energetically blocked or artistically blobby), I get frustrated and a little panicked over the time and energy I’m wasting and losing in the process.  

When I’ve looked more closely at all of this, I realize: it isn’t untrue.  I do waste a lot of time, energy, and potential.  I throw away a lot of what I create or could create.  And this is okay.  More than that, it’s essential.

Because we are organic and evolving creatures, our systems need space, give, and excess.  And our creative projects, also organic and evolving, need the same.  We need the nourishment of composted waste and recycled dead things to continue to grow and expand.

As I’ve found again and again, creativity defies notions of productivity as linear progression and absolute efficiency (which is what makes art such a fierce, defiant, and effective challenge to capitalism, as well as an essential tool in rewriting narratives around value, labor, and production). Whereas capitalism tells us we need to function like machines – staying in zones of activation, overdrawing our resources, and maximizing output at all times– creativity reminds us that moments of stagnation and slowness are part of the process, which not only allows for convoluted wanderings and wasteful inefficiencies, but actually requires them.

Whenever I waste my creative potential – for whatever reason – I am often tempted to either send it away to a landfill so I don’t have see or deal with what I lost, or, out of denial, stuff it in a jar with some preservatives and put it on a shelf, so that I can pretend nothing is lost. 

But there’s also a third option I’ve been trying to practice more and more.  And that is composting the wasted thing – burying it in my own garden, so that it can be recycled and incorporated back into my system.  But here’s the thing: the catalysts that instigate this composting process are the feelings of grief, regret, and frustration over what was wasted.  I have to feel this stuff to compost the loss.  Which means I carry the residue of the loss (even as it’s transmuted and transfigured) in my garden forever. 

But this is creativity and creation in general.  Waste, death, and break-down are part of what makes it possible and sustainable – together with the beauty, flow, and alchemy, all of it opening a path ahead that – paradoxically – is both well-worn and uncharted.

Embracing Complexity and Paradox

I used to understand the essence of self and life as singular – that there is one path we’re meant to walk and one self we’re meant to actualize in this lifetime.  Of course, we wander around trying to find it, but the ultimate goal is to arrive at the one true thing.

But thanks to recent happenings and some amazing conversations with coach-astrologer extraordinaire KJ Sassypants, I see it another way.  Becoming ourselves is not a process of narrowing or stripping away to get to a tidy, unified something; it is a process of living into the paradoxical plurality of the varied – and sometimes conflicting – forces, energies, motivations, traits, and desires that make us “us.”

There’s definitely a certain kind of narrowing that comes with clearing out the gunk we’ve absorbed from the culture, unwinding the unhelpful stories we inherited through our lineages, and dispelling the lies we’ve internalized from the voices around us, but the more I’ve done the work of unpacking and releasing what I no longer want to carry, the more I’m finding complexity, not simplicity, at my core.

What I’m seeing now deep down in myself and in the beautiful humans I work with is not a simple self, straightforward destiny, or clear answer; what I’m seeing is beautiful chaos, irresolvable multiplicity, and unruly paradox.

In a world that often wants to shrink and flatten us (into compliant citizens and eager consumers), reclaiming our multidimensionality, complexity, weirdness, and apparent contradiction is a life-affirming and radical act that’s profoundly important. 

Living from this space of all-and (KJ’s phrase) with integrity and alignment requires an expansion into ourselves and into the world.  It means embracing the unwieldly internal chaos and paradoxical mystery that is always pulling us past the edges of who we thought we were.  It means reaching toward new horizons of meaning.  It means living a big life. 

For me, this perspective has been super liberating.  Instead of jumping into the fray of endless internal conflict or fighting with the aspects of me that don’t always get along, I’m forging unlikely truces, building imaginative bridges, and just showing up as me.  I’m embracing the convoluted weirdness in my own self and in others and appreciating all the ways this makes life more interesting, expansive, and magnificent.  So shine brightly and weirdly and paradoxically, friends.  The world needs our real selves.

The Both-And Space

For a while now, and especially since the election last year, I’ve felt pulled between two divergent understandings of reality:

1. Times are dire, and things are profoundly not okay. People are being hurt. Oppression continues to roar in old and new and imaginatively reinvented ways. And also: we’re heading toward ecological collapse that will mark the end of humanity on planet earth.
2. Everything will be okay and is already okay. There are deeper forces at work. We can heal. We will turn this around.

I’ve vacillated between the two, trying to figure out which story is most true, effective, and helpful, and to be honest, I’ve not been particularly impressed with either. When I step into the not okay version of reality, I quickly descend into manic despair, despondent self-loathing, and/or fatigued paralysis, all the while torturing myself with visions of apocalyptic hellscapes I’m convinced loom imminently and ominously on the horizon. Exhausted and overwhelmed, I turn to the everything-is-okay story, which feels better until I begin to look away from truths that ask something of me, slip into spiritual bypass, and run from pain (mine and others), none of which is in my integrity.

But in the rhythm of this back and forth, I began to notice brief flickers of peace. I realized they existed in the transitory moment when the pendulum passed through the middle on its way to the other side.

And the more I saw this, the more I felt pulled back to that middle, the space in-between my stories, to the very center of…something – the both/and space, where two or more things are true at the same time. Paradox. And this is the only way I know how to be in the world right now.

So life has sort of become a journey of descending deeper into: “wow, the world is really fucked-up, beyond what I ever imagined. How do we even bear it?” But also and at the same time: “wow, the world is a truly magical place, beyond anything I ever hoped for or imagined. How do we even stand it!?” Both may be true, but either by themselves feels like a lie.

I’m convinced we are living in a both/and time, a time in which we are being called to expand to hold more pain, more truth, more mystery, more paradox, and more magic – to make space for the multiplicities calling our names.

So I’m going in, looking hard at the world and letting the pain of it swallow me up, reaching, at the same time, for a loving stillness I don’t quite understand that meets me there and asks me to move in generative cycles of blended contradiction rather than in straight-lined, back-and-forth pendulums. And sometimes, in this quiet space stilled by paradox, I can almost feel something like hope, an unknown yet familiar thing, stirring under the surface.