Creativity Part IV – Birth

Out of Silence

“…Silence is the Mother of possibility.”

Robert Sardello

After a long season of silence of soul, of waiting, pregnant with what is becoming, there is birth. This creation, once a growing potential is now coming to full-fledged life, ready to enter into a conversation with the rest of the Universe. This seed, once so small, has swollen into a life that must burst through the confines of its containment and find the light of day. It can be a halting, laborious and tenuous process or it can surprise us with its ease and sudden appearance.

It was eighteen hours of labor with my first child, the most intense experience of my life. It felt as though my body was in convulsions. An involuntary, total body-gripping, seizure-like force took over. And the closer it came to the time of delivery, the more intent this force became on obtaining total body possession. It was painful – Oh yes. But I must say that for me, the lasting impression has been the complete inevitability of it and the sense of experiencing a complete takeover.

My second child was born shortly after my water broke, not a single contraction that I would call painful and he showed himself to the world after two short pushes. Yes, birthing can happen in a number of ways.

When it comes to the birth of creative expressions, the paths to fruition can be just as unpredictable. In his book Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks talks about the role of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations in threshold moments of consciousness, either right before a person falls asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations), or just as someone is waking up (hypnopompic hallucinations).

These types of hallucinations have been part of the process for some creatives such as artist Salvador Dali, who depicts windmills made from butterflies and watches melting over various surfaces, or writer Mary Shelly whose story Frankenstein has captivated the world’s imagination for over two-hundred years or inventor Thomas Edison who we have to thank for the light bulb and dozens of other innovations.

These creatives all benefitted from hynagogic experiences. As Sacks says in his book, Hallucinations, “Few phenomena give such a sense of the brain’s creativity and computational power as the almost infinitely varied and ever changing torrent of patterns and forms which may be seen in hypnagogic states.”

Creations may come as simply as a waking dream or as arduous as the ten year labor that produced Rainer Maria Rilke’s TheDuino Elegies with the haunting line, “Who if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?”

In many cases it’s almost as if we need to put our linear thinking on the sidelines or at least take it off as the captain of the team in order to allow the other more unorthodox players a chance at the game. Setting aside our own conscious processes and insistent thought patterns is a way of making room for another sort of conversation, one with the more creative side of ourselves, where possibilities are unlimited and unrestrained and where mysteries can be brought to light, where new life can come to birth.

“Silence is our medium that brings toward us a sense of our becoming, of our being within a field of destiny, and of an orientation from the future. Due to silence, we are not simply the products of our past, the carriers and enactors of memory, nor the playthings of archetypal imagination. Our future, however, is not yet formed, not anywhere. The future is an open field of possibilities, and Silence is the Mother of possibility.”

From the book Silence by Robert Sardello

How do you find silence within?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Threshold Consciousness