On Safety Nets and Security

We are in Naramata, BC wine tasting and hanging out on a beach for a few days. It’s my second of three expeditions west in a three-week span this summer. I’m a BC boomerang for the next little while. But, sitting here on the end of a dock jutting into the morning-calm waters of Lake Okanagan, I can’t think of a better way to spend my time.

Several things have struck me between home and here. One is a phone conversation I had recently with Dana the Artist. She told me that she creates not to make a bunch of money or make people laugh or think, but because it brings her closer to God and keeps her sane.

I started back working on the screenplay. And I understand now what she meant.

Just sitting down to work through a character, brainstorm an idea, meditate on a connection or metaphor or whatever, makes me feel like myself again. I feel peace right to the centre of who I am, but that core of calm is wrapped in joy and excitement. I’m moving forward! I’m living again!

I understand now the necessity of creativity. I understand now what Dana meant when she said that touching someone else with her work was a bonus prize to a reward that can’t be quantified. I understand that denying this part of myself is denying a God-given right and gift and purpose. Which would be a very silly thing to do.

I don’t know why I’ve been so afraid. I don’t know why I’ve been resisting this essential part of who I am. The part that must create, the artist, the child, the core of love and light where it all makes sense.

I think that was the lesson of this brush with depression. It seems that screaming, clutching plunge into darkness is what awaits me if I don’t create. Sometimes learning what doesn’t work is more effective than learning what does.

When faced with the alternative, my fear dissolves.

I’m about to take a big leap of faith. Another one. A bigger, more open-ended one. I don’t know the details yet, but I know they’ll be revealed to me as I go. The leap I am making is to commit 100% to my creative work. Commit in the ‘wake up at 5 am and start writing in the dark’ sense. In the ‘go to Paris for as long as it takes’ sense. The ‘live on the street if I have to’ sense. To make the crazy, delicious, ballsy moves that 18-year-olds do. The ones who get off the bus in New York with five bucks and a suitcase fulla dreams.

I might use my condo as a studio (which means paying two ridiculous Calgary mortgages at once). I might sell my place and use what I make to live in Paris. This probably sounds stupid, pointless, even dangerous to the RRSP-contributing security-minded plan-for-the-future people. But to those who have let their dreams shrivel, those who are starving on the inside, trying to hang on to a life that is nowhere near as beautiful as they’d hoped, this sounds like the best plan in the world. Possibly the only plan.

I’ve been concerned about safety nets. Having enough money, or a copywriting job to fall back on. But after teetering on the edge of depression, I see things differently. So-called security isn’t my safety net. Creativity is.