Creative Fulfillment and Loneliness

We need the womb of winter to incubate and grow new life inside us. We cultivate seeds of intention for what we are creating in the world. Sometimes that means introspection and solitude, sometimes it means connecting only with friends who totally get you. Mostly it means being a little slower, quieter, and more spacious.

A friend is making a book, fulfilling a dream in words and images. It seems like the perfect winter project.  Yet she is in heaven and hell. She could choose heaven and immerse herself in the joys of the creative work before her, doing what she loves, and bringing her vision into vibrant, living form. Or she could choose hell and bemoan the isolation, her recent heartache, and be looking elsewhere for salvation. I hope she can find more space for all of those feelings. 

I realize this has been a common theme around me. Another friend is devoting a lot of time and energy to her creative life and trying new things to grow and heal. Yet in this self-care mode, she's coming up against a core loneliness.

When in a creative groove, do we always meet our loneliness? Does fear of loneliness keep us from going deeply with our creative work? I wonder about my novel/s, languishing for my lack of disciplined, consistent attention. Perhaps that's just a judgment. I do suspect my characters just go on living and changing and have infinite patience with me to catch up.


There's that old belief that writers live a lonely life. But tonight is a time for company, to be with my characters and to write in the company of others. In the rainstorms of winter, a safe haven.

Thank goodness for the writing workshop. That is one way I balance creative time and mutual support.  How do you?

(Collage: Friend And Flow Detail 1, by Carol Harada 2010)

Being Love

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

Magic happens when we are busy being love. I don't mean being 'in' love, as if it were a substance we swim in. But being love, the walking talking ocean itself. Touching everyone and everything with our gentle wave, bringing love to everything we do.

A friend described her life of late: providing great service to people at work, realizing some visionary projects and handing some off to others, paying off debt and saving for the next big thing, tending the relationship in a new way with her life partner. She is happy, excited about life, and at peace.

Part of me is pure envy listening to all this wonderfulness. And still I am awake enough to recognize that she is Being Love. She's crossed into new territory. And she is making a difference. I am Present enough to be happy for her.

I try to remember moments of being love. Setting out for a hike, anticipating adventure. Making my husband laugh. That still, crackling point when a counseling session opens up and my client and I are deeply moved by discovery. Making art when I let it make me. Allowing myself to be all broken in front of other people. Letting their compassion mosaic me back together. Noticing that my cat has hypnotized me once again into giving him a belly rub.

How do I get back to this being love when it feels so far away? The envious part of me desperately needs to know. Does the self-care routine come first? My friend has fine-tuned her nutrition, rest, and yogic spiritual practice. She actively loves herself with the basics every day.

Or is it an internal action? A surrender to love, a YES to life, a declaration of I am here. It probably doesn't matter where it starts, as acts of self-love or reaffirming belief in love and the goodness of life. Just that it starts. In deep winter, with our much needed rains seeping into thirsty earth, seeds of being love are being fed.