Dear friend,
I don’t know about you, but I try to write with intensity. A place of feeling. I’m not in floods of tears or writing with tightened fists, it’s a focus that burns from within. My emotions are directed at the page, a will to express something, from the heart through my finger tips. I don’t know what it is or where I’m going, but when it comes I feel a stirring, a sensation in my chest. Work falls from my hands and satisfaction cradles my spirit.
I don’t know if the work is good or bad, but I don’t think it matters. Sometimes I despair at the weight of editing if the ideas are complex and yet understood. But I have faith in the process, that I, like you—human—hold something universal, and through emotion, by free expression, will meet with you in the eternal and true.
But now, through untruth, I feel I should guide you to your intensity. That’s the expectation isn’t it? To give guidance and accept it. That’s where culture has herded itself. The teaching of half-baked concepts, few of which are tied to any concrete reality and essentially arbitrary. Like fiat currency, its only agency the agreement of its users, a game of metaphor and rhetoric. A slight stir in a dissident few is enough to shatter the support beams and crack columns.
But what if, without the courses, without the book lists—the theft of your intellectual autonomy—what if you’re enough. Isn’t your creativity your own, emotions your own, body your own? Everything you’ll ever need is already there. What natural faculties does anyone else possess that you don’t? There’s no need for supreme intelligence to create, or great strength of body to build. In fact, it’s the free use of the mind and body that enlivens them. They, too, are created and built. Will being the first mover, nature’s primary source of creation.
The only advice I could give is to lean into feeling, into sensuality. To experience, understand, and direct them into a creative medium. Only you can do that; understand your own proclivities and how to focus them. It’s your mind, I can’t know it. What else could I or anyone do except encourage, support, and cheer you on? It’s your life after all.
And there is no creative ceiling, that’s worth knowing. Beneath the desire for status, fame, and security lives a creative need. A need to grow, not improve, grow. Sometimes we grow into a corner, leaves without light, a new direction required. What if we grew in straight lines, always improving? What would we miss from those dark corners?
It’s never been about improvement, adding another string to your bow, amassing a set of skills ad infinitum. It is the act of creation that is most satisfying. The here and now. That is the experience we crave; immersion in an amalgamation of mind, body, and spirit; reaching out from the edges of what’s known, searching for a sentence, an image, an idea—the meaning of it all brought back and shared; a little piece of the soul, of nature and the universe, in the palm of your hand while we all gaze and wonder at what you’ve caught. Is there any pursuit more satisfying?
Create with purpose,
Talk soon,
Thomas W. Gardner.