Living Creatively with Known Unknowns
By the no-light of the dark moon, and by the no-sight somewhere between ending and beginning, we find ourselves again in the unknown mysterious dark.
Uncertainty can become a stressor when there is internalised pressure to know, or to perform, or a lack of support and capacity in the moment.
And sometimes, always, it is Vulnerable with a capital V. And that’s just damn uncomfortable.
I have been swimming in this vulnerable discomfort for over a year, deepening the places where I allow myself to feel it, thanks to many different supportive relationships and practices that connect me to my authenticity, and the memories stored below consciousness in my body.
The belief that “I have to know the answer” because otherwise I will be in danger has been a core belief of mine since I was an infant. And yet I have come a long way from not being able to admit that I don’t know - the difference being that I increased my capacity to feel the discomfort.
Not knowing can be scary.
When collaborating with my friend Elizabeth for Write - Draw - Perform I was doing a lot of drawing of stairs. Yes, staircases.
Stuck in the middle of the stairs, was to be in a no-where place with no direction and no movement.
That was the message I internalised as a child reading ‘Halfway Down’ a poem by A. A. Milne. The body memory which I empathetically connected to in that moment was that of being a child alone with emotions way too big and complex for a child to name. There is no specific memory, just the emotional charge stored in my nervous system and re-experienced repeatedly as a freeze response in my every day life.
And so it was with curiosity that I began to notice the frequency with which I would say “I don’t know what I’m doing” and get deeper and deeper into that experience.
I had long interesting discussions with Adanma Kwankwo on her Instagram lives and she invited me to an open mic in London to say something about the creative process and the role of the Unknown.
I was going to share my zine Not-Knowing There Is No Map For This that day.
But then, wondering how to get a crowd to enjoy a very small, intimate paper book that is designed to be held in the hands, I decided instead to write a short story called The Black Snake Called Treasure which is about connecting to emotion as a treasure rather than a overwhelm event.
EXCERPT
The woman has been making maps. She is windswept and shining, weary and earthborn, grieving. Sometimes her eyes seem to change colour.
The maps show landmarks and relationships between places. The places have names like Cave of Not-Knowing and Beach of Not Yet, Happening Hill, and Arrival Point. The places are recognised by emotion, thought and sensation.
Pathways on the map connect one place to another and have names like “follow your impulse”, “stay with sensation”, and “safety first”. As the map is charting creativity itself, it encompasses both the subterranean and invisible below the surface of the world, where imagination lives, as well as the tangible experience of living a physical life in a body that can participate in creative action.
Midway through my self-directed creative development period funded by Arts Council England, I attended a folk and wellbeing conference at Worchester University and presented The Art of Listening In The Dark, an experimental performance. It involved vocal sounds and an improvised artist statement, contrasted against my pre-written slides.
During my preparation of the performative lecture I was very ‘in the dark’. I recognised that it was imperative to leave space for the unknown to enter, in order for the experience to be true to the moment, and fresh. That left me feeling all-the-feels.
My commitment to not-knowing the details left me with just a rough sketch of the elements that would hold all this together. Until, there I was, standing in front of the academics and artists and policy makers responding to my own slides, and collaborating with my past self to share my creative process and create a shared experience.
The only time I felt too vulnerable was when I got to the prompt “howl (with sticks)”. Each sound was supposed to connect me with the feeling from which I would speak.
The authentic grief-howl caught below my throat and so all I could do was admit to being way too shy to attempt such a sound.
At that point one of the audience said “we’ll howl with you!” and the room erupted with the sound of howling wolves.
With this, we had arrived at the significant moment, unplanned and apt.
Some big emotional processes we just aren’t designed to process alone. That which we feel we can’t look at, are usually matters that need to be looked at and tended to collectively as communities, families, or societies. They are too big for any one persons nervous system. And so we howled together, in solidarity.
Something else that has been happening and supporting me during my “vulnerable with a capital V” year has been my studies. I have been studying to become a Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery (RBM) practitioner which requires over 420 hours of personal and professional practice. The International Certificate of Breathwork Mastery is a competency based qualification in that you must be demonstrating key capacities and capabilities consistently in your daily life.
One of the significant side effects of my training is the ability to be with my emotions, thoughts and sensations and trust my personal process more, regardless of what is coming up. An important benefit of RBM is that whilst you are practicing Breathwork Mastery and generating your own experience, there is always a professional support person sitting with you providing safety, witness, and a spacious supporting nervous system.
I will share more about this practice in future posts but needless to say, it brings me great joy and excitement to use it to cultivate more creativity, consciousness, and wellbeing in my relationships with others, my self and my work. With your permission I would enjoy sharing it with you too.
P.S. Today at 10.27pm GMT the moon is ‘new’ or to be precise ‘dark’ (it is invisible in before the light of a new crescent moon appears in the sky). You may notice, if you pay attention to the energy of this moon phase, that some things in your life feel murkier, harder to see a way forward with. The days either side of this event are not usually characterised by forward movement. Allow yourself this time of noticing what is present with you ‘in the dark’. This time shall too pass.
Until next time…
Touch uncertainty and navigate not knowing with my pocket-sized artist book. Introduced last issue, the book poetically contrasts internal and external experience. It also includes a writing prompt so you can make your own map and develop your own contemplations.
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This month I am reading:
Scores for Daily Living by Emma Waltraud Howes published by K.Verlag
I am on Instagram at:
maija_writes
maija.stephanie
Dear Maija. Thank you for sharing so beautiful thoughts. I find myself between them. I feel being in between, sometimes I feel this ''between'' is multiplied like in matryoshka, and I do not know. Your touching story about howling moved me deeply. Don't we all have that howl inside us? Final belief that we truly are, and yet it is not enough to howl on your own. To fully feel that you are, you need other voices, then you are seen, then you are heard. Your words caught me in between too. I read them in the deep night, I am thinking about them in early morning... Thank you again for them.
Dear Maija. The profundity of your known unknown. What a fantastic share.
It is so big, your capacity.
Every project you do is so deep, so powerful, so shockingly synchronised My commitment now is to show up better. How wonderful your stairs are and your Vulnerability.