Welcome Awake and Creative.
We go a little crazy in this week's session.
Are you ready?
We're diving into spring.
We're staring down week 17.
And everything is getting wild.
I'll see you there.
Saturday morning.
Dark.
Sunrise still tucked into the horizon.
Snuggled under those covers for another hour or more.
And here I am.
And I imagine you,
Too.
The ambiguous audience.
The listener.
As if here now with me,
Though in actuality in some future place.
Some other time.
But in that strange way we don't completely comprehend.
Right here with me now,
As well.
I've been writing a lot lately in my poems and newsletters about a rollercoaster.
Or this rollercoaster as a metaphor for life experience.
I think before I could even articulate this fact that it existed in me,
Perhaps pre-existed.
Which is that I've always wanted to find or know something mattered.
That is,
That life had a purpose or a meaning.
I can honestly say I'm not certain that we get to know that.
But it helps,
For me anyway.
The only way in which I can find peace with this question,
That perhaps has no answer,
Is to believe that there's a higher place,
A grander scheme,
Than just my one life here.
Or even all of human life here.
In terms of my rollercoaster metaphor,
This certainly adds to the peace that can be found when at the bottom of the slip slide.
And also,
Too,
It helps keep in place those high highs.
Reality checks.
Perhaps this thinking is madness.
That's what I'm addressing this week.
Not institutional madness.
I'm talking about living madness.
Creative madness.
A furiousness of will that is this search for understanding and purpose.
Sometimes,
For me,
This is akin to the frenetic energy.
The energy that finds me in the studio.
I'm sideways to my own mind and simply creating.
We call it flow.
But I don't know about that.
It's different.
I'm in myself,
But not in myself.
And I'm with myself,
But not with myself.
All living things contain a measure of madness.
Without it,
The world couldn't function.
What if?
What if this madness is the creative power that is the purpose?
What if the reason we've come to see madness as a malady is because those who seek control for themselves without this higher sense of purpose and power recognize that the madness is outside of their paradigm?
They can't control it.
They'll disparage it.
What if you are here this week to go fully mad?
As I skip on into this 60th year of mine,
Nearly halfway to the 60th celebration,
Sheryl Crow brings me a thought.
The quote for this week.
And to me,
This aligns with that madness idea that I'm exploring.
It takes a lot of living to be your authentic self.
There's a lot of information out there about what we come into this world with.
And a lot of wistful thinking and talking and writing about getting that childlike mind back.
I don't quite see it that way.
As if the world has laid over an original that we need to reclaim.
There's some of that,
Sure,
To a degree.
We have to drop cloaks and take off layers.
But also,
Not all of it.
Those layers are our authentication in this life.
They're the proving out and building up.
And fortifying the authentic self.
We don't come here fully formed.
We form in process.
If we're lucky,
We recognize that as co-creators,
That madness is the best course to follow.
Tie those ideas together here and take Sheryl Crow's quote with you into this week.
See how mad you can go so you are more your authentic self.
It takes a lot of living to be your authentic self.
Awaken creative.
Today.
