Creative Seasons

Accept and nurture your creative spirit. Any productive and creative act has seasons associated with it: A time for preparing, a time for planting, a time for growing, and a time for harvesting. We can accept the rhythms of our creative, artistic life just as we accept Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.

Transcript

Make yourself comfortable. Settle in. Adjust your seat, Your couch, Your bed, Wherever you are doing this meditation. And take a moment to be proud of yourself. To celebrate that you are giving yourself this time and space. Breathe in. Feel the progress of your metabolism, Body cycles, Pulse and breath. Be grateful for all that you have within this miraculously contained unit of your body. Be grateful even for the stray thoughts which will surely perturb you in this meditation. Because our brain is always functioning to keep us alive, To keep us vigilant. How are you breathing right now? Slow? Steady? Awkward? Ragged? Maybe you're still rushing from what came before this meditation. So you can take note of your breath and then actively choose to make it deeper and slower. Sometimes a powerful antidote to anxiety or worry is just physically slowing down. Moving slower. Speaking slower. Breathing slower. Allow your body to experience all of its sensations. Stiffness, Strength, Courage, Determination, Sleepiness. Glance around your body internally and notice what's what. Where are you holding things or lifting things? Can you make your physical experience a little more easy? Perhaps by breathing into places that are tight or just guiding a generous awareness into any place of clenching. It doesn't have to be that hard. Meditation can just be giving yourself the time to do less. To not focus on any one thing in particular. In a word, Boredom. In every human life there is creativity, Productivity, And surprise. We can do the work, But we can't predict or force the result. The experience is like the experience of changing seasons. Sometimes over the course of a year or a month or even a single day, We experience seasons of creativity and productivity, As is normal and healthy. When your mind wanders, As minds typically do, Just come back to listening. Come back to paying attention to your breath and noticing your physical contained form with its blessings. In every life, In every created and creative life, There are quiet seasons. A winter when not much is happening. Things may be cold or dark, Rainy or gloomy. You may be at times incapable of getting anything done, Unaware of your creative spirit laying cold under the ground. It may seem like a time when not much is happening. Seeds are dormant. Nothing is growing yet, But there is activity out of sight. It may be a period of years, Months, Or hours. We can't say, We can't force, But we can enjoy the quiet, The stillness, The solitude, And accept our own lack of control over the results. Breathing in, Breathing out, Steady. Returning to the meditation if your thoughts wander, If you're fidgeting physically or mentally, Just come back to stillness, Quiet. Be grateful that you can return and be grateful that you have the capacity to wander. In a creating life, There are seasons like spring. The warm impulses start to find us. We may still have cold days. Some days it just feels like procrastination and we're tempted to shame ourselves for procrastinating. Perhaps the truth is that we're just gathering. Gathering in awarenesses, Impulses, Knowledge, And inspiration necessary for the eventual creation. Just as in spring we might plant seeds in a garden, Nourish or till a field, There is time for this too. The gathering, The preparation, The sowing, It's work even on the days we don't see it. In the spring we have no idea what the summer will bring, No possible way of knowing the harvest. Can you feel that as excitement and not anxiety? Curiosity but not concern? Gathering in, Take a deep breath in and breathe out slowly. Then there's summer and the productive act blossoms and grows, Becoming what it is ordained to be, Whether by craft or genetics. Ideas rise up, Manifest in physical form from a seed we barely understood. We watch and attend to the vegetables or stalks, Stalks, Ideas and dreams becoming real, Nurturing the roots, Trimming, Weeding. But the creation is almost no longer ours, Surprising even the gardener. The art surprises the artist and becomes its own self, Something we could enjoy and celebrate or be fearful and disappointed about, But that won't change the work. I invite you to celebrate what's growing in the summer of creativity. Breathing in deeply with a long exhale. Then there's fall or autumn. We do the work of harvesting, Of separating and releasing, Bringing to market or giving away what we've made. The communal sharing, The produce, The fellowship of a table of food or an audience for an artwork. In autumn, We separate the creative act from the creator and give it to the world. This might be the scariest time of all. Will our tomatoes be tangy and sweet? Will the wheat withstand the grinding mill? Can we give over our creations now that they are no longer ours without shame or embarrassment because they are free to be given and shared? Delight in that possibility. You're breathing. You're settling in both the excitement of the seasons and also an acceptance that they are not yours to control in time.