Given Form
If you write even a little, at some point you will have one of those sentences or paragraphs or scenes where you “nail it.” The thing comes out and what you had heard or seen or felt in your imagination is there before you on the page, both exactly what you wanted to share and yet new at the same time. For a brief moment, the satisfaction is so complete, so restful, that you think, “I could die happy,” until you remember that that would mean you wouldn’t be able to do this again. What has just happened? First, something existed within you that was known but which had no form. Even if you had “seen” it, seen the bridge or the face or the six-limbed alien, you had only seen it in that nether region of your imagination. But it was real enough that you knew it, knew it well enough that when you saw it rendered in words on the page you could recognize it. And that moment of recognition—which is what falling in love feels like, what meeting a new friend or a tasting a great food feels like—is an intersection of that which exists within us with that which we have brought to us. It is the recognition that what exists in our imagination, without form, is as real as the sun if enough steady attention is aimed toward it.
That is why deliberate creation is so satisfying and why we keep coming back to the page. Yes, our egos can get hold of these moments and hold them up like trophies, but there is no peace there, because they are not proof of anything, they measure nothing. These moments are instead an affirmation of what it is to be a human being. It is a reminder that we are not here to make money or win races or get elected or even to make babies, we are here to seek the intersection of that which we know but which has no form within us, with that which exists outside and so can be shared with others. The satisfaction of creation is the satisfaction of life. A thing that both puts us at ease and beckons us for more, the meaning always the doing itself.
If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.
