Creativity Part III – Waiting

All In Good Time

A seed, once it’s planted, doesn’t show itself above ground until a root system has begun to develop. This vascular system provides the nutrients that a plant needs for growth and it also acts as an anchor, providing stability. This important preparation for the life of the plant is hidden from view.

The soul’s preparation for life’s fullness is mostly hidden as well. Our unconscious is continually drawing the food needed for the life of our psyche from the depths, drawing it upward toward our conscious parts. The process is organic and acts in large part without our conscious participation. Through dreams, interaction with symbolic images, nature’s narrative and other supra-cognitive phenomena, the seed, the core of our soul becomes nourished and a strong supportive structure is established. Our soul is home to our creative self.

Germination – gestation takes time. A vibrant life is developing. The practice of patient waiting is essential.

In her book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd describes her own gestation period as she re-conceived her own self. She speaks of being “suddenly struck pregnant” and then “inching along” in a seemingly slow process of hidden unfolding, while the expanding nature of new life is coming to its fullness.

It can be said that our expressions of creativity follow the same path, from seed to sprout, from the beginnings of the development of an embryo to the birth of our creation. This takes place in a season of patient waiting. Few ideas come to us fully formed and none come fully executed. This waiting time is not only when the creation is being shaped, but the bearer of new life is being shaped as well. We are changed by the creativity we bear.

When a caterpillar retreats into its cocoon, it is about the business of change. It is re-conceiving itself. In its hidden place the caterpillar undergoes a metamorphosis in which, what once was – is no more, the old structure of itself literally disintegrates and what are called imaginal buds (the literal true name) activate the material of a new creation that will become a butterfly. To be hidden in the cocoon is to be in a season of waiting, a season in which the old structures that are incapable of supporting the new creation disintegrate and “imaginal buds” take over to thrust a new creation into the world.

Wisdom dictates that this essential part of the creative process, this waiting, be accompanied by awareness and intentionality, perhaps in the form of silence and response. Waiting entails a liminal space of sorts, an imposed silence that reaches beyond sound alone. It’s a silence of the soul in which all movement is slowed down to a near perfect stillness. It’s from this source of stillness that the stripped down seeds of primal creativity may be born and in the stillness there is a spaciousness for authentic response, not a knee-jerk grasping, but a reverent step toward holy conversation with what is longing to be born.

How will you cultivate awareness in your time of waiting?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Conversation with longing