It's been a while.

Want to know what I've been processing? *hint - it's creative blocks

I have four drafts of half started blog posts in my Google Docs. I have three introductions to a book I haven’t admitted I’m writing. My notes app now numbers into the thousands with paragraphs or sentences or single words that I’ve been meaning to extrapolate. I haven’t. 

With so many open tabs in my brain, I’ve noticed an urgency I don’t consent to filling the space of expectation. An inner nattering of what I *have to do suffocates any potential inspiration and I remain creatively catatonic.

It isn’t that I’ve been procrastinating, per se, but I haven’t been motivated to create either. 

Instead of relinquishing to that imposed urgency, I want to do the thing that dispels the shame - to name it, dialogue with it, share it, bring it into the light. 

It’s always interesting when my internal ethos is mismatched with my inner dialogue. Let me explain. My core ethic is that our bodies fluctuate with energy, passion and that we cannot expect constant output for our bodies that require 8+ hours of sleep a day. It’s just not realistic. I have so much space and compassion for the rhythms of my body. 

And yet, the panic of my project management Gantt charts is embedded in my brain. When I don’t have things to stress about, my brain picks at random intrusive thoughts that amplify my nervous system - because that’s where I become accustomed. It takes hard work to remain soft. My intrusive thought of today was about the plot to a horror movie I have never even seen. When our body’s become accustomed to a certain nervous system state, it will pick at random ways to maintain that state. As our life becomes more easeful, the ways our body maintains stress becomes more ludicrous.  

It’s because my nervous system, just like yours, becomes acclimated in the ebbs of life, to the suffocation of the summit and I, just like you, instinctually mistrust the descent into the flow. No matter how many times I have been caught at the base of the mountain by cool, refreshing flow, I still worry that one day, it won’t be there and I’ll descend from the ebb into a vacuum of an abyss. The ebb feels safer because I know it exists. The flow sometimes feels too good to be true.

That’s why I named this newsletter, the Flow. It’s an ever present reminder that the Flow has always been there. 

Because the thing is - life does ebb and flow. Naturally. We summit and descend, swim and float because that’s the very nature of life. Life expands and contracts around us, whether we summit or swim. 

I know and I trust that my creative energy always returns to me because it always does. I know that it takes hard work to remain soft and I’m also not immune to these contradictions of being human.

At my core, I trust my creative energy because I’ve witnessed my creative rhythms ebb into inspiration, sparks of wonder lit all around me. Not every spark stays - it isn’t supposed to. The sparks that stay lit end up gestating and gestation takes time. Inspiration and gestation don’t look like a whole lot - honestly sometimes it’s building Pinterest boards that suit the moment or looking at previous creative works I’ve birthed. But don’t mistake passivity for inaction. So much is being woven beneath the surface. 

When I actually trust and surrender to the inspiration & gestation, the birth always comes. And with the birth, is its accompanying labour. Of course there is. With the birth comes an intensity - I lose myself in the moment and find myself oriented in a different way at the end of it all. It’s as if my psyche is taken up in a creative storm and gently placed back on solid ground with the cells of my skin completely transformed.

This creative process cannot be rushed or reorganized. The birth cannot occur without the gestation. The gestation cannot occur without inspiration. Inspiration cannot occur without space. It is in the times that I don’t know what to do with myself, I am most inspired. When I’m doing dishes or driving or in the shower, I receive little delicacies of the imagination.

Despite this intentional ethos on the nature of creativity, I still find myself pressuring, well, myself. To output more. To provide more. To write more. To paint more. To give more. 

I know that expectations snuff out the beauty of creativity and objectifies the awe of the process for the sake of output. I know that and I still feel it. I feel it because our culture moves so damn quickly. I cannot keep up. Maybe you can’t either. I don’t think we’re supposed to. 

When I picture my life, it is not moving quickly. It is not a rapid river. When I picture my life, it moves slow, more like waves gently lapping on the shore. 

I want to share because I believe knowledge should not be hoarded. I want to share because I have a thousand stories to tell. I want to be able to share, not because I feel I have to. I want to accept adrienne maree brown’s invitation to “move at the pace of trust” and for me, that means moving at the pace of my body. 

My body is not fast. My body is actually quite slow. She takes time to discover what she likes, what’s good and what the next step is. She takes time to consider all of the possibilities because there are so many. I trust that she’ll make the right decision because her decision is mine to make. 

This is a very long winded way of saying - my output here will look different. I want to show up here because this space is important to me. I want it to remain unsullied by expectation. I want to protect this space from the objectification of obligation. I want to share the thousands of stories and hear yours too. 

So sometimes I’ll share here every week but probably not all the time. More likely, you’ll hear from a spark of inspiration that stays lit long enough for me to capture it’s essence. You’ll read about the little fires of inspiration everywhere and after they’ve gestated, you’ll be the first to know about the birth. 

I don’t know what the birth will be but I trust it because I trust myself. I hope you can trust yourself too.