The Briar Philosopher - When You Feel Destroyed - Create (Free Access)

The above title has been a maxim that has kept me going through all kinds of things and it has been particularly helpful over the last several weeks when stress and anxiety have seemed to greet me at every turn. There is something about turning my hands and heart toward bringing something positive into existence that seems to balance the negative and the falling away of things. It doesn’t have to be much, just something creative. In the last couple weeks I’ve baked cookies, tried a new recipe or two, planted lettuce and spinach and the Boy and I have finished and recorded a new song we’d been working on for a while. All of those things are relatively minor but they have a major impact on my perspective. It is too easy to let yourself slump into shadows when troubles and grief come knocking at your door. These small things make for big lifelines. 

It’s not just the end result of the creative process that helps to heal my fractured mind, it’s the process itself. The making of anything usually starts with a mess. In planting my lettuce and spinach in my newly cleaned bed, there were old plants to remove, soil to dig into looseness, and compost to add, leaving my hands black with dirt and a pile of old plants to be cleaned up. It was a mess, but the end results will be green shoots clearing the ground with a promise of salad soon to follow. The making of the cookies is always a mess. I am not a neat baker. There is usually flour everywhere by the time I’m done and there is always a mess of bowls, measuring cups and spoons, utensils and such to be cleaned afterward. The end result though is a lovely plate stacked with good food for us to enjoy throughout the week. Even the making of a song is a mess of sorts. Words and notes and riffs must be tried and tried again. There are flat notes and rhythms that don’t quite fit; words that don’t really make sense and faltering voices at times. The end result though is a happy little honest tune that makes us smile when we play and sing it.  

It is the process that reminds me that the process of living is often a mess if you catch it at any particular moment. It can look like a trainwreck but sometimes it’s the only way to get back on track. It reminds me that creation is often the end result of destruction. It reminds me that change is a constant and if I can ride out the rough bits I can usually get to the new ones. 

Pablo Picasso once said that every act of creation begins with destruction and I haven’t learned anything in this life to prove him wrong. He was speaking metaphorically as well as literally. One must sometimes destroy an old mindset to start thinking in a new way. In planting, a seed is destroyed to create new life. And, when you think about it,  how many things must end for a cookie to come into being? Life is a dance of birth and death, matter and energy coming into and going out of existence. All that we are is tied to those cycles, those seasons of becoming and falling away. 

Spring has arrived, and with it the destruction of winter. Day comes, and with it the destruction of night. Music comes, and with it the destruction of silence. Life comes, and with it the destruction of death. Everything in its time. Everything in its season. The creation of the universe itself was the ending of a singularity. Something is born and something dies. Something dies and something is born. Too many times, I think, we get stuck in the destructive side of entropy and fail to see what is coming into being as a result. It is, of course, difficult to maintain such a philosophical perspective in the immediate face of tragedy and that’s understandable. One must feel the things they feel and shed the tears the situation warrants but one must also remember that we are all together in this dance of life and death, this cycle of creation and destruction. It is common ground we walk, you and I and we and us. 

In the coming weeks the Boy and I have another song about ready to call “created.” There will be soil to till and trees to prune and, soon, more things to plant. There are  more things I want to bake and many many more words I wish to write. There will be life in abundance to celebrate and death in abundance to endure as we walk through the years. Such is the nature of being the beings we are on this planet. As it should be. As hard as it is to bear sometimes there is no denying the nature of nature. The best we can do is find ways to aid the process of creation so the shadows of destruction do not always block out the sun as we go.