Storytime
I’ve been noticing lately a soft pressure against these periodic “daily” writings.
As if to write, I have to push through some membrane of resistance, not so much within myself, but as it it surrounds what may be written.
Like the reluctance to break an egg before the thing inside is ripe to be born.
Writing some “thing,” is easier. More like crafting the new fruit from within. Starting at the subatomic structure, I just go about stitching something together. Writing about, “What is Web 3?” for instance. Just one foot in front of the other.
Even now, having crossed the threshold into this daily piece, it just begins to unfold, word by word.
I think the membrane has to do with story. Perhaps more to the point, it has to do with the integrity of story. Not just the integrity of structure and holding together, but the integrity of “is it worth it to tell?”.
Every bit of writing is story, and perhaps that is obvious. But is it?
In fact every bit of perception is story; and therein lies the rub.
Sitting in meditation this evening, I noticed some thought elaborating; constituent parts were familiar characters, a familiar idea of self, familiar contexts and processes.
Of course, upon looking, there was just the looking. There was of course the subtle idea of me looking, sitting in a room, meditating, looking. The looking and the seeing co-arising, one phenomena elaborating upon itself, empty of any substance, but “harder” around the edges where characters and other constructs began to take form.
This perception – seeing and seen, one in two – had no “real” substance. And yet familiar, like so many cousins, thoughts elaborated before and since. Like bubbles boiling on the surface of some great pot of “experience.”
Empty stories. Instructive? Perhaps. True? Only in the most profoundly limited and narrow sense. Useful? It depends, I suppose, on what one is after…
Like the phenomena of awareness co-creating itself, object and observer as one, creativity lives at the heart of every life and I am no exception. Writing, as it were, appears to be just one of the most likely pathways “out,” from that heart in me.
And so the impulse, the impetus, the subtle gesture within that seeks to pierce the empty page, to bring what moves inside it out to play in the world.
But there is also a care. What is this care? Is it the razors edge between wanton production and self conscious humility? I think I can do better, let’s call it a commitment to beauty. Perhaps not always successful, but always sincere.
And so, if writing it is to be, a story it will be, a story of perception, some thought, some picture, some feeling made visible through words.
I think that membrane is a sacred check; something that reminds me to do my best to break silence, to break stillness, to intrude upon the perfect moment only in service to the most sublime and loving and careful beauty that I can imagine, all without stifling that precious evolutionary employees, the heart of perception itself, creativity.