“To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.”
-David Whyte
Well My Friend,
It is hard to speak today in any register other than a howl of horror. I suspect your heart is crushed, as mine is, by what the United States is unleashing in our names. The grossness of war-making as unconstrained egocentric adolescent dick-swinging is too much to bear, and of course it just compounds the raft of moral injuries to which the body of our nation (not to speak of the world) has already been asked to submit.
I hope you are finding ways to let that howl out in whatever form it is crying to take and finding companionship with others who are feeling as you are and who, like you, are reaching for sanity and courage.
This is about the kind of courage it takes to exist in a place beyond where the coordinates you’ve known can help you locate where you are, the courage to listen past the immediacy of outrage for whispers of the “unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. This is about the courage it takes to occupy a place where old maps have fallen away and you find yourself re-orienting to new systems of navigation.
It is this kind of courage - what we might call creative courage - that we’ve been exploring all June in the final month of the Spring KOLO program. Within the theme of Venturing as a creative practice, we’ve been talking a lot about how much courage it takes to creatively flourish. Along the way, we’ve also been investigating what it might look like to think of risk and courage in feminine terms, not as battle-won virtues but as an allowing of our organic unfolding as we open, blossom, and send delicate tendrils out to test out new possibilities.
Most of our metaphors for courage and risk are drawn from masculine archetypes of heroes in battle or on epic journeys. This masculinist notion of courage pulls us toward thinking of our creative flourishing as a matter of tightening up, gaining control, fighting against obstacles, scaling mountains, and conquering inner and outer enemies. (Stephen Pressfield’s popular book The War of Art: Break Through Creative Blocks and Win Your Inner Battles epitomizes this masculinist world view applied to creativity.)
These metaphors continue to lead us to soul sickness and annihilation on every level, from the intimately personal to the international.
An alternative articulation of courage draws upon organic metaphors of unfolding, opening, blossoming, and sending delicate tendrils out to test out new possibilities. It assumes that our nature is to evolve, to seek full expression, to reach toward the light, and to travel beyond where we have been.
In this frame, the risk of venturing is the risk of allowing ourselves to follow our nature. The risk to leave behind what we have outgrown, the risk of not knowing where we are going next, and the courage to trust ourselves to feel our way by attuning to an inner navigation system that may be uniquely our own. We are not fighting ourselves, we are not battling to be heard, we are not in opposition to negative voices inside or outside of our heads…we are simply following the lead of what is wanting to happen next, we are allowing our nature to extend itself more fully, we are trusting the path that feels like the growth we sense we need next.
It was in the context of this conversation about Venturing that I’ve been working this month on an assemblage I’m calling “Crossing Over.”
The piece features a spiral-shelled snail poised above a dark space, a crossing place made from a cast-off bamboo steamer basket embedded in a cigar box.
You’ll see our snail friend is situated on a fragment of thesaurus text that highlights the word “poise” with associated words like “equilibrium” “impreturbability” “composure” “evenness” “calmness” and “cool.” There are also hints of the opposite of this state - words like “frenzy,” “madness,” and “excitability.” I thought this made a nice set of reminders to our slow, steady friend for how to be as she moves across the bridge.
Where is the snail heading?
It is moving away from the surety of the ground it has known, away from the roots from which it is used to drawing energy and life, and away from a geography navigable by the fixed coordinates of a compass.
The “unknown that is begging it on” is a very different space, one governed by the logic of ever-moving stars and the unbound movements of flight.
The pull in the direction of this complexity, dynamism and freedom requires our snail friend to steadily move across the void at the center of creating - the fertile space of not knowing, but trusting; not seeing how, but inching forward anyway.
Here’s a side view that gives a sense of the depth of the space.
You can also see here that the snail is focused less on the maps around it and more on the felt sense that this is a path where growth is happening (see all those bright green leaves?).
When you see “Crossing Over” as a whole, you get the sense of how our snail is poised between two different navigation instruments, and how s/he is occupying a third realm where s/he is calmly, steadily feeling for the possibility of growth, expansion, and greater freedom.
and still you bloom wild courage
in a thousand little ways
despite your winter.
aren’t you a miracle?
- Liezel Graham
This week, I invite you to reflect on how you, too, may be “crossing over,” and how you are expressing the kind of courage it takes to bloom.
What are the spaces and/or the navigation systems that no longer feel like they serve you?
What is your sense of the unknown that is “begging you on”?
How would it feel to release any battle metaphors you are holding and shift to a metaphor of allowing or unfurling?
What in you (or in us) is wanting to bloom?
What helps you occupy a zone of equanimity, steadiness, and calm, even when you are in a space of not knowing what is coming next or where you are exactly heading?
As always, your comments are welcome! I’d love to hear how you are moving through your own crossings as an individual creator, or how you sense us moving as a collective - or both! How are you blooming wild courage these days??
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