To repeat a point we explored previously in “Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1),” it’s vital in creative work that you learn to embrace the recurring fallow periods during which you feel like you’re not getting anything done, since these are the times when your unconscious genius is performing its magic by going to work on things you’ve learned and planned through conscious effort, and is transmuting them via a process of psychological alchemy into the stuff of inspired originality.
However, and as also stated previously, we’ve got to recognize that not all waiting is alike. It’s common to think of waiting as a passive activity, a non-action that’s indistinguishable from idleness. But the type of waiting that’s involved in creative work is anything but idle. In fact, it’s highly active, so much so that you may be just as well served by thinking of it as an aggressive courting of your demon muse, a kind of “come-on” that encourages your inner partner to provide the hoped-for influx of inspiration.
For an helpfully illustrative analogy, I direct your attention to field of religion, where we find millions of people engaged in a type of waiting that’s directly analagous, not just broadly but quite specifically, to the type of waiting we need to learn in regard to our daemonic inner collaborator. Read the rest of this entry »
