I’ve been resonating with Hugh’s thoughts on creativity from the day he started posting. Hugh’s posts come during a time when I spend a lot of cycles thinking about calling, destiny, and time–considering the next few months and next few years, and narrowing my focus, deciding if something must be done, when it will fit into this timetable, which, oh yeah, also has to account for paying rent and buying food.
I wrote in my personal journal:
Calling is the only word that transcends this modern / postmodern / postwhateverthefuck boundary. It is the only word that wields power, that trumps the suspicion, denies the doubt, buries the naysayers. But why must we trump their words and attitudes anyway?
Dan Hughes has also been writing about calling:
Calling makes a demand for what cannot be adequately proffered to an audience: your life.
I’ve been re-reading Mike Riddell’s Sacred Journey for the third time:
The way forward almost always lies through hardship rather than around it. It is unfortunate that so much of the message given by our contemporary Western societies seems to suggest otherwise. We are constantly being sold the line that success in life consists in accumulating and protecting. The art of leaving requires exactly the opposite: releasing and emptying. It is something which is best learned by navigating the experience.
My mom wrote me in an email today some quotes from Richard Rohr…
…[people say] “I don’t want to learn another way to look at things.” They act as though they have God all figured out. These people betray a need for control at all costs; unfortunately the cost is high indeed.”
I don’t know what I’m trying to say with this post. People don’t understand many things I’m doing, and often they don’t understand me. People don’t know how I’m surviving, and much more often I don’t either.