Sunday, November 13, 2011

Creativity Cleanse: Day 6/21 Clearing Away

Reading in Ordinary Magic (edited by John Welwood) this morning, Chogyam Trungpa states, "Clearing away is as important as starting."

That struck me because my nature is to start things which I do much better than clearing them away.  Even as I sit here I can see the residue of things I've started and not cleared away properly.  It's related to yesterday's entropy discussion.  But I wonder if it's more than the half-read magazine on my bed.  What in my life has not been cleared away properly?

The example Trungpa uses is the tea ceremony where washing the tea dishes and putting them away properly is part of the ceremony.  Like most of us, my life has been set on "full steam ahead."  I can see where I've lived a lot of my life on the "get close and move on" principle.  I used to think of it as a plus.  Fifteen things done "well enough" were better than five done perfectly.  Loose ends were to be ignored in the momentum of keeping up.  That's the way things are; that's what successful life requires; that's what I've always thought.  And, perhaps I didn't have much choice while I was in the roaring river of life.  

But, now I'm in a side channel, a smaller, slower stream where I can drift in lazy circles, examining the shifting patterns around me, touching what engages me, being touched, being healed.  As I write this, I feel a quiet calmness enter my body.  My typing slows and words grow quiet and further apart, 
                        
                     it takes a long moment to add the period at the end of this sentence.  

I don't know what comes next.  

     I wait.  

          Not knowing.

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