your creativity needs you to sit in the park

deliberate nothingness will save your life.

Your silence wants you, and it will save your life.

The stretch of a day will surprise you if you let it, with the first threads of the book, the song, the pivot, the new idea. What happens to those seedlings when we leave no room?

When I wake up, I usually have a calm but distinct feeling about what I’m about to go and do with my wild, wonderful life. A creature-thing visits me in a dream and arms me with everything I need to get through it all (-the ultimate solution to everything.) But with every waking second, the creature-thing retreats out of view, and I’m back in the cool morning of it all, feeling refreshed enough to begin my day but none the wiser. I have a theory about this. The night is our resting time; sleep a gleaming treasure box. There we lie, safe from all earthly conscious distractions, safe, even from ourselves. That’s why we receive our downloads as we sleep. We are nicely out of the way.

In the morning, we begin again. During the day, we travel further from the message because there is so much Life to Go and Do. As a kid, long periods spent alone wandering and dreaming allowed me to stay with the message, watch how the earth bloomed in Spring and early Summer, notice the carpet of green underfoot, and marvel at the edge of the land against the sky. My young brain was formed alongside these phenomena; I wanted to name them, to connect them to what was happening in my body and the world around me. Thus came writing. It was only ever a translation, a way of being in touch with the world, and myself, and you.

So why, as a writer, would I give that up now?

Why would you, the creative alchemist of your life, give that up now?

Why, now, when we need our conscious choice, thoughts, originality and innovation more than ever?

We often don’t realise when it's happening. If we were entirely conscious of what is stolen from us each day, we might never pick up our phones. Nowadays, spending every waking moment reacting is possible—a fear response, comparison, consumerism, rage bait response, a response to an opinion, or even an active response to a how-to podcast. But it is almost always secondary. This way, it is possible to drain your focus, squash your fragile idea factory, overload it, choke it.

For someone who claims to adore silence—and I do—I am baffled by my recent resistance to it. I notice, too, a constant hum of noise - which I am calling ‘creativity’, ‘productivity’, or ‘research.’ It has become a tactic. I have sewn it into the fabric of my life. Perhaps I am trying to escape myself. But why?