One year, 3 months and 4 days ago, upon my return to the United States known as America, I began a new chapter in my life. I also began reading a fantastic book by the name of Eat, Pray, Love. Like all things that motivate the best in people- emotion (mountainous and valley-like), inspiration, new sights and new horizons, empathy and relation; the word on the greatness of her work spread fast. It's a quaint thing. I'd wanted to do an entry on the book after I'd read it, while the imprint it left was still fresh, the ink of her words gleaming on my dead-of-winter Caribbean tan. But I didn't. I just never took the time or allowed that inner seed of desire and will toward expression to plant itself into this blog's box. Ah how it works. All in due time, my dear. Methinks the seed was itself still developing.
So sitting here, 456 days later (I'll give a buffer of 3 days for the time it took from landing to me actually obtaining the book in question), surfing these boundless and tangled interwebs, I ran into author Elizabeth Gilbert's February 2009 talk at the TED conference.
Timely.
Now.
Three months later, and not a moment too soon. Not a minute later than it should.
'surprisingly moving', indeed. The point of her thoughts in talk barreled over me in the same way she recounts her encounter with poet Ruth Stone's "thunderous train of air". The air of creation, of inspiration. That 'other', that genius, that 'buffer' between us - creative souls - and the eventual alchemical outcome of its passing through.
Like the holy trilogy, trinity.
The number three and its effectivity in tying together the ends of then, now, there.
It, Me, This.
Genius, Man, Creation.
"One manifests as two.
"One manifests as two.
Two is transformed into three.
And three generates all the myriad entities of the universe."
He is the middle man to us as middle men that does not ask permission and will not be told 'no'.
He is the middle man to us as middle men that does not ask permission and will not be told 'no'.
Tom Waits asked him to wait, for a more practical time at which to create.
But if you've opened that portal, have stepped once through that door, you will know that forever more, the mirror you see in that room cannot but bounce you back to it.
The Room Full of Mirrors has eaten many souls alive. Those tortured artists Gilbert mentions, the ones who fall into the River of their image, not to rise up like a Phoenix, but drown in their thesis...
& I wonder, drawing out the mirror parallel farther...
Have you ever noticed the infinity produced by two mirrors reflecting the space in between? Curving to the side of an ever-shrinking bending of your line of sight.
That space, is it the buffer? Is it the genius fairy-like creature "living in our walls", two mirrored walls perhaps, with the second mirror as the manifestation of our creative efforts, with our being standing as the other mirror?
Or are we the space between? One side delivering through us what is to bounce back on the other, exactly the same but shaped by our standing there, filtered through our abilities, sensibilities, sensitivities...
Going with option number two -- when that second mirror ceases to back us up in our reflections, and we're left facing ourselves, the work perhaps a little more void of the fullness of bending holograms, is it any less valuable?
Any less of a study and capture of that momentary self-fulfilled truth?
This moment after the allah, the olé: she admits the inevitable difficulty, of dealing with just 'me', sans a fairy genie. And so full is this portion (I admit, I teared) that it deserves its own quote:
"Maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish
"Maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish
if you never happened to believe in the first place
that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you
but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you
from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life
to be passed along when you're finished, to somebody else.
If we think about it this way it starts to change everything...
Don't be afraid, don't be daunted, just do your job.
If we think about it this way it starts to change everything...
Don't be afraid, don't be daunted, just do your job.
Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be...
If the divine cock-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then olé.
And if not, do your dance anyhow.
Olé to you nonetheless just for having
the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up."
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