Induced musings on the coo and call (and backslap) of the creative process. Blame NJCreative for my thinking about this.
When pursuing a goal or inspired to begin a project, the feeling of pursuit is manifest, strong, and lovely. As if to catch the very air we run and scamper over the impeding rocks, unheedful of their danger. Success and adventure follow our unwearied steps. Songs lift from our labor as from the cricket's legs, the natural and high accompaniment of action.
Once well-in to the project, with either an end in sight, or the continuance of the chase yielding only more of the same, and not better or other,--not, certainly, anything new. Really delightfully, damnably new. Not the happy accidents of the first scamper, but the predicable results of knowing application. But one goes on because the project is incomplete without further results, and a sense of obligation arises. I shall spend so many minutes per on this project to see it to completion. Then the song huffs out of the accordion, and you're only left with the effortful pumping. You sell your guitar and you seek a new medium, fresh rocks, unclimbed hillocks and a dawn that does not so damnably always arise in the East.
What can transform this dull pile of stuff in your heart back to the glitter of its original gold? Where is the shine that first called you from your nest? Where's the fiddle that makes the dancers clap and thighs thump to the bump and the beat? Oh, yes, it's certainly somewhere. But where oh where, and how do I dare to find this time what was given times out of mind? How release the slap of happiness from the grip of obligation?
Well, I don't know how exactly, and I certainly don't know why, but love's the stuff that makes the obligation light, and keeps the work weighted with meaning which otherwise would pall. Then there's the joy of pure service rather than the ego of going, the I of accomplishment. The good things in the doing reassert themselves, and the experience returns to its open components, the hippy constituents of which it is knitted, and is not so knotted to the goal you've imposed. And yet the goal remains, and is not diminished. It simply shares the space of active doing with the humble propeller love provides.
So, fall in love with yourself, and in love with your whimsy which prompted the project first. Serve the girl who kissed you before she knew your name.
