Creative energy is everywhere (let's take a look around while we wait for the water to boil)
on potential, patience, creativity, and the utter joy of listening to what lives beneath the words
A year ago, I heard someone say on a podcast that to be “burnt out” didn’t mean being overworked so much as it meant not doing the right work. This sounded good (sounds like something AI might advise), but I didn’t agree then, and I don’t agree now.
Sometimes when we don’t have satisfaction in one area of our lives, we open up new channels. Sometimes things don’t sit right because WE are not right. Being in integrity doesn’t mean the perfect circumstance. And being in integrity usually means feeling flow, even in impossible times.
Sometimes, it seems nothing happens. Sometimes, it seems everything does. Neither is true.
A talented and wise friend I met some years ago told me about the superblooms that sometimes grace California's deserts. While it doesn’t happen every year, what makes the poppy and bluebell blooms “super” is their suddenness, unpredictability, and expansiveness. A staggering number of these flowers arrive at once and blanket fields in color and soft beauty that change the very appearance of our planet from space.
When I lived in San Antonio, I remember a smaller version of this delight when people would drive to the Hill Country to see the bluebonnets explode across arid fields in late March or April. For weeks or months, the flowers were “on it,” as though they’d been waiting for the opportunity to emerge wholly, to reach up toward the sun.
Creatives can relate.
We wait, we think, we plan, we take steps, and then there is the moment that everything seems to bloom. To think we can have balance in day-to-day life can mean putting undue pressure on ourselves during dormant times.
So much of nature holds back, waiting for the right time, taking time to transform or delay development until the conditions are right. Nature responds in a way that is not sentimental or worried about fulfillment.
Meanwhile, so many of us go in two (or more) directions at once, hoping we’ll increase our odds of blooming quickly, intensely … but science class taught us that potential energy is about an object or organism’s inputs and position.
And maybe potential builds when we do not feel like we have to always be blooming.
If we allow the energy we need to build, we may find ourselves blooming—surging ahead—and creating something more magnificent than we can imagine while grinding away.
A year ago, I began taking blackout periods in my day, where I refused to answer emails. I’m returning to this practice, slowly, ever-so-slowly, to till the soil.
To me, to be burnt out doesn’t mean to do too much or the wrong thing. (We’re always doing, even when we’re resting.) It means to try to hurry along what needs time to build.
We can’t force a flower to bloom, and that’s why it’s so shockingly beautiful.
Prompt: Before I had words for it, I knew…
Here is a meditation with context. We will root down and reconnect with the body and its stories in this opening meditation. Please have a notebook handy.
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Hi Jen, I love your blackout practice.
I have something similar. I call it my beach bum practice. I’m not very good at it yet, but I’m trying. )
Thank you, Jen, for these important thoughts. I have not listened to the prompt yet…