We are only ever a footstep away from chaos. We spend so much time trying to smooth our edges, tying up loose ends as though life were a shoelace forever coming undone, stitching our seams so the loose change of our thoughts doesn’t fall through.
And then we type, or draw, or make, and we notice that to reach the places that are truly interesting, we have to open the door and let disorder in. To enter the Mysterium, the Land of Never Before, the Place Where Ideas Are Free To Find Us, we must let the starburst of inspiration rise like a supernova and explode across the page in a mess of ink, and words, and half-formed phrases that swell, and collapse, and rise again like a soft soufflé.
We must surrender, if only momentarily, to a beautiful pandemonium that is part of our inherent design.
And then we see it: all this effort spent polishing our edges was just a holding pattern for a necessary undoing. That it’s the chaos, the disorder, the bits where we allow things to fall apart so they can then come back together that turns out to be important ingredients for the thing that capture our hearts.
So many wonders- the Milky Way, the people you love, the birds that arrive the instant you hang nectar feeders, the leaves that fall and return in spring, the fragile daffodil pushing through hard dirt (is it the most delicate thing you’ve seen, or the strongest?)- are all born of a kind of chaos you could never hope to understand, nor would you ever want to control.
Such is the carbonation of our experience, the fuel for all our stories. To create in a way that has a beginning, a middle and an end is to rest in a necessary jumble, a process of doing and undoing and doing all over again.
