Incandescent Transcendence

Incandescent Transcendence

I hope you will all forgive the hopelessly flawed and erratic schedule of my columns. When I tell you that my infrequent and distracted postings are due to cataclysmic creativity, I trust you will understand. I must follow the muse elsewhere when she calls. This absolute inspiration surging through me, plus the busy reality of writing six various columns, has lately meant less attention to this one.

It has also meant some deep happiness, a rare treat. Happiness usually shows up for me in fleeting, elusive snippets, bright shiny fireworks that snap, crackle, and pop, gone by morning.

It also visits by knocking frequently on tiny and profound windows- black current in a favourite teapot, the man with the long eyelashes and gorgeous rippling biceps at the gym, a special poem in my email from Tara, the sliver of moon cutting through the navy expanse of spring dark.

But when I’m in the zone, really in the zone, for long and productive stretches, where brainstorming and output and focus share centre stage, I’m deeply, truly happy. It’s the most profound happiness I know.

In this period of my life I have been trying to transform the compulsion I have for over stimulation, as an exercise in coping with anxiety. I’m reaching for the kind of confidence I need to produce my truest work instead of giving all of my time and heart to other people’s projects, or to jobs I hate.

I’m reaching for peace, and for space, and I’m praying for time alone and time to heal from battle scars and the courage to think positively. I’m weeding out, breathing slower, letting go, moving on. And I’m making every effort to fill the hours with my art and not get lost in my unpredictable impulses and their consequences.

I’m fencing up my heart to say no more strays, not now, even though Timothy Findley once wrote, the “lost are so beautiful” and when you grow up in a labyrinth of madness, you see the beauty in Suzanne’s seaweed, too. But sometimes you get strangled in it, you drown. I’m practicing boundaries, I’ve promised to triple guess my heart, to look both ways before I cross the street.

It’s all about freeing up space. Mental and spiritual space. Space is scary. There’s too much of yourself in space, not enough noise, not enough distraction. The claustrophobia is deafening. Just you and your grief. You and the truth. You have to face what you don’t want to face, make peace with things you cannot change, come to terms with the dead because you yourself are not dead.

It’s about freeing up time. Taking the extraneous, unnecessary things away, so that a new gift of time and space emerges. Letting fall away the ones who didn’t really understand or love, the ones in whom you invested too much for nothing, and stop chasing after them, and stop giving time to the hurt that ripped you up, because you’re toughening up because you’re finally calling spades spades- (whenever you can see them and you’re not particularly deluded.)

Those parts always spent in upheaval and upset, in exhaustive depletion, too sensitive, too abandoned, too isolated, too surrounded- now they are free space for the people and things who have bolstered me, taught me, cushioned my falls, saw me, knew me- held me, not held me hostage. And more time for even more of my work. Less time chasing pavement? Not filling time with filler.

And here in all of this empty space, space that is lonely and unfamiliar, you know no one can rescue you after all, and you’ve been wrong to think it every time. But here you are. Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone.

And I have left that space wide open for the Muse and reading and creating voraciously, both written and visual work. I get sketchy now if I don’t get enough hours out of the day to put down the words I have in my head. I am calm and focused and resolved. I’m researching and writing all the time about fascinating people, finding out how other intense, disturbed, and serious artists function(ed). My novel is rapidly taking form, work I’m proud of so far and hope you will see one day and agree. I’m learning so much about wildly disparate topics- spices, the dudes who wrote the Bible, intersexuality, and the hard-drinking and serious writing life of Carson McCullers. And I’ve found fresh inspirations for painting, realized that my painting and writing are really interwoven, interdependent, fuelled one by the other.

Last year I was so supremely depressed I wondered how I could go on, and no doubt I will feel that way again, maybe tomorrow.

But today I can’t imagine how I could have been so pathetically sentimental, crying over spilled milk.

Happiness is not about the presence of an emotion or a distraction from hurt, and nor is it the absence of sorrow. It’s about investing all of your energy into renewable resources, if you can. Working hard at whatever you’re doing, and doing your best at it. About making time for silence and for art. It’s about letting nothing stand in the way of your calling. Nothing. That means not stopping even if it doesn’t work out financially. It might never. You do it because you can think of nothing else. You tap into flow, into the most alive parts of the universe and you don’t ever run empty.

You don’t run empty because you are no longer giving to distractions, the past, or to toxic people, the space and time that you are now giving to the muse. You have invited her to live with you, to sleep with you, to be with you forever. You have invited her in to stay, not just to come and go whenever you’re not busy.

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can find her books at www.amazon.com.