Empty Spaces and Organic Progress

One of the things I continue to work through in my own life is my relationship with productivity and action.

I have all sorts of embedded stories around the levels of productive action I “should” be taking to be a successful and okay human - remnants from all those years as a student with perfectionist tendencies and neurotic habits, which took hold easily enough in a constant stream of looming deadlines and amorphous tasks, like research, reading, and studying, that could be extended into perpetuity because they had no clear beginning, middle, or end. Empty time was wasted time because there was never enough of it.

Life is different now, but even though I’m more or less in recovery around my hyperproductive leanings, I sometimes still catch myself believing that the only way to get what I want is by doing stuff, pretty much always, or that the only way to feel okay is to be in energies of movement and activation all the time, even when I know it would be better to let go and relax.

One of the things that has since helped me change and heal is reconnecting with my embodied self and remembering that I am an organic creature, not the disembodied machine that capitalism tries to make of me.

I remember the natural world. I think of a garden. There’s action that needs to happen: planting, tending, harvesting. And in between: a whole lot of empty space for mysterious processes of growth, alchemy, and creation that make happen what is far beyond my power.

A relentless stream of action and force will kill any life form. And it is not the way I want to live.

Nature needs empty spaces of unfoldment, and so do we - often more than feels comfortable and okay, given our cultural inheritance.

Just like the plants and the seasons, we need time and space for the magic to do its work on and in us - to let go and surrender to what we have no say in managing or controlling.

So I try to remember that it is not all up to me. I have my part to play, and my action matters, but so does my rest and my participation in emptiness and stillness. And beyond and within me, there is a whole web of being and existence that carries me along too.

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.