Creativity challenge
Today I’ve just started a journey. A 12-weeks guided reflection to fully recover my creativity following the book ¨The Artist Way”. I’ll be dedicating about 10 hours per week to focused activities to unblock my potential once again.
One of the key activities will be the morning pages, a completely personal, stream-of-consciousness daily task to gain clarity and put out on the page all those things that are currently a block to true expression. A self-therapy at all levels, well worth experimenting...
I will also be taking myself on weekly artist dates, doing - alone with my Child Artist - some hopefully crazy and refreshing new activities that will give me joy and new perspectives.
This public post is just to show my excitement about this to the world!
I’ll also take a chance to share on where I am at the moment in my life path.
Lost. As usual. No clue of how to orient myself in a world that is heading straight to fascism and globalized war. The world is ruled by dangerous buffoons and the news are simply surreal. I feel we live in a fake reality orchestrated under our very eyes and with our consent...and that there is a new baseline of cynicism that is being imposed on us.
I don´t really have a solution. As usual. I stopped activities that are urgently needed but which don´t involve a deeper restructuring of our relationships. I feel we need to totally reorganize our lives to strive and achieve some meaning. In any way I look at it, I seem to always come back to my original dream of a network of rural communities rooted in the territory and cooperating with each other. So yes, there’s no escape from my obsession. An, yes, I am now in Brussels. Cognitive dissonance: ON.
Nor a plan. As usual. Life here is going well in the Present. I strive to live on the moment and do lots fun activities with nice friends. So I tend to procrastinate my departure. But the Dream is calling me again and I now have a renewed energy to take on the challenge of building something collective in a rural place. Am I ready to put myself into service of a higher cause? Am I ready for acting from a position of emotional strength where I can really be open to listen to others in the same level I listen to myself? Of embarking on a process of growth that will never be finished..of letting go of a goal (living happily hereafter in a community of friends) which may never be achieved?
No answers. As usual. I can only say that I have been deconstructing. Definitely the concept of couple (which I was looking up to in the past..) has completely lost sense for me. Love can be everywhere (in real friendships for instance) and has nothing to do with sex. I think I have reached a stage where I can dedicate myself to the collective, whether I am in an intimate relationship or not. And I’ve been constructing. I have a clearer vision that I want to work towards a network of communities reunited under the umbrella of a community land trust. It seems to me the way to square the circle between pursuing my personal goals and contributing to a larger reorganization that is somehow political.
We live a wholly cultural life. We have almost no contact with unmediated physical experiences. Our entire source of meaning is now separated from the autonomous satisfaction of our needs. Our cultural conditioning makes us think that in these times it is a privilege to live an autonomous life and to give up politics. I believe all our value system today is based on a fossil-capital society. All our thoughts are colonized by it. Well, this era is coming to an end. Time to embrace a Philosophy of Life and start living in an immoral way according to the standards of Death.
The basic level of a Philosophy of Life is meeting our real needs by ourselves. If we stop there, though, it is a philosophy of survival, which I believe is short-sighted in the current context. I believe is imperative to go further and actively strive to reach out to more people and - in particular - act in solidarity with those who are being victims of the capitalist-driven ongoing collapse. Autonomy and solidarity are the Pillars. The belief that the ultimate level of growth can only be achieved with others is the key Assumption.
About personal death: we’ll be all gone probably much sooner that we believe. There’s nothing after death and suffering has no meaning. So I want to live in the best possible state and help others do the same. I want to cooperate in ways that enrich both our lives. Put solidarity at the centre as a celebration of Life, not be a martyr or a hero sacrificing in the name of a theory. I may be missing my ticket to Paradise, but the Maker will turn my pile of bones into a beautiful wild flower (better if invasive).
Rambling mode: ON. For my personal sanity in a world of uncertaintly, forgive me for introducing the only topic of which I am certain: salaried work.
Here the questions:
Do I prefer doing a very clever job, being very specialised on something that is totally useless (which was what I was doing as a Senior Engineer) in a context where everyone is in competition with each other... or do I want to use my intelligence in a way that fits within the context of Life itself? Do I want to keep putting up with hierarchies and be surrounded by overrated pricks who constantly need to please their egos? Where those at the top are the ones who show the most loyalty to a Death-making system who makes them materially rich and morally poor?
Wow! I finally have an answer for those! I am not starting from zero :) The certainty of the answer is solid. The proof can be obtained by simply looking to a tree, to a rat, to a blade of grass, to the face of a loved person... and then -for contrast- by looking at the silhouette of a modern car, the distilled wisdom of patriarchal capitalism.
The Maker is just on Another Level. The web of life is pure genius, everything is perfect at any level of detail, in a way that is just exhilarating and humbling at the same time. We cannot aspire to emulate it, we can only play along and strive to see how we can harmoniously become part of the plan. We are not atomized individuals, we are part of something bigger. We are organizing to defend what’s left of Life and to navigate together these times of the Great Unraveling.
