Resilience

Keep going.

You already started… starting is out of your control, you have followed your interest and your unique proclivities and that has gotten you here.

There is more ahead. Successes however small are an appetisers. Failures are lesson.

Seven Pressfield famously named the enemy resistance.

The artist job is to push against it. Resistance takes many shapes. One of it’s most powerful forms is shame. Look out for it.

As you push through Resistance, it might transform into Shame.

The devil of the bible’s nature is to steal, kill and destroy.

Shame is one such devil.How dare you think anyone would care about what you make? How dare you consider yourself ‘special’ enough to make something that anyone would want. Make a living doing what you LOVE?! HAHAHAHAHAHA.

You might be a seed or a bud, shame tries to keep you from becoming a flower or baring fruit.

It takes audacity and a kind of shamelessness to keep going.

The thing that same is trying to kill is faith and hope.

Faith that your seed would indeed turn into a flower and fruit, what else could you do, it’s what you are. Don’t be surprised by the resistance it is inevitable. And it comes in so many forms. But what is more real? The fact that seeds, lead to buds, that eventually bloom and fruit. Or the empty mocking of one devil or another.

Resilience is a decision to not wither and die.

As I write this I think about the bristlecone pines. Specimens of them have been found to be over 5000 years old.

They survive by hanging in there, channeling all their resource to the smallest strips of live bark. Most of the tree might be dead, but as long as some strip of bark is alive it uses that the keep going. It’s a lesson in resilience by the oldest living things on the planet.

LIVE!

CREATIVE ACTION

Maybe you have creative dreams that are dead or dried up. But do you have even a strip of live bark, some small portion of interest that you can channel your creative energies into. Are you doing so many different but avoiding cultivating that strip of live bark. What is that piece that makes you most alive, can you give it your full attention and presence for 10 minutes … now?

A YES, could change the course of your life.

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