Category Archives: Creativity

Two Dead Birds or the Bliss of Living a Wholly Creative Life

cedar waxwing 2I’ve charged my unconscious with changing my life completely in the next nine months, opening doors to outrageous success and the bliss of living a wholly creative life. Waking me doesn’t know what that looks like, and must trust the process, which is why I am out of bed at just after midnight. It may be interesting to note that I have always considered myself a night owl, and that I have long believed I’ve done my best creative work after 2 a.m., but have gradually reformed myself into she-who-goes-to-bed-by-eleven-so-as-not-to-fall-asleep-on-her-morning-commute.

This afternoon, my wife found a matching pair of dead birds on our back patio. They were beautiful and unfamiliar to me, with shiny fawn-colored bodies, wings tipped with brilliant crimson, and a distinct yellow stripe at the end of their tails. I consulted the weathered Field Guide to North American Birds I’ve had for more than half my life, and determined they were cedar waxwings. We had speculated the birds had flown into the rolled-up awning on the roof above our sliding glass door, as there was no indication they had struck the door itself and would not have likely have landed where they did had they done so. According to the book, the birds travel in groups of about 40, and have what sounds to be a very spirited flight pattern. I imagined these two traveling with their flock, darting here and there like daredevils high on adrenaline, or motorcyclists cutting traffic on a busy interstate, risking the final exhale that follows a miscalculated moment of breathtaking exhilaration.

I felt sad when I picked up their lifeless bodies, and now, hours later, my eyes are tearing up as I write this, despite feeling certain the birds did not suffer. I imagine 38 cedar waxwings sharing a wave of grief over this sudden loss. Or perhaps these two slipped away unbeknownst to their flock, their disappearance forever a mystery to the others. It is not for me to say that birds don’t grieve or ponder the unknown. Humans certainly do. And being one of those meaning-seeking creatures—whose species also tends to egocentrism—I am curious about what this event means to me. Ultimately, how I process it will have everything to do with how I frame it.

I can point to the obvious: existential fear of my own mortality. It also occurred to me, after I had used the motorcyclist metaphor, that I lost a dear friend to his love of the open road, nearly seven years ago. And even as his memory brought a few more tears, I remembered, with the same certainty that I felt about the birds’ untimely end, that he had gone out exactly the way he would have wanted.

Finally, I recalled hearing that some believe finding dead birds to be an omen. A cursory Google search revealed that some cultures believe it portends a death in the family, while others believe it signifies life, or that it represents the end of a personal struggle. I also came across an article written by Christopher Moreman, an associate professor at CSU East Bay, On the Relationship between Birds and the Spirits of the Dead, that specifically mentioned the very type of birds we found:

The waxwing…is called strebe-vogel (death bird) by the Swiss due to its association with the arrival of winter and its perceived habit of voraciously gorging itself on berries that might otherwise feed people during the barren months.

As if this weren’t enough synchronicity, my meaning-seeking brain also plucked this out of the article:

The North American Osage describe various spirit worlds, the highest of which is populated by birds embodying human souls.

Because—Hey!—I have Osage roots!

And then there is synchronicity, itself: much of Moreman’s article had to do with the collective unconscious and Jung’s concept of the archetype. I am in the process of writing my final paper, or personal integrative project, for my graduate program in transpersonal counseling psychology, and it appears that Moreman’s work might point me toward some relevant references for that.

It is worth noting that I almost did not include the opening paragraph, as I was not aware it was connected to the blog post I set out to write until I wrote the paragraph that precedes this one. When I scrolled back up to read my reference to my unconscious, I was struck by how it had made the leap from former night owl to the pair of dead birds I didn’t even know I wanted to write about. Even after I noticed that the opening related to the writing that followed, I nearly edited the ambitious, meant-for-my-eyes-only reference to radical transformation. Except that the next sentence said I must trust the process. A little clarification for those who aren’t reading this with my eyes: my wife and I are moving back to my hometown in about nine months, and while that doesn’t sound like much time to make lasting changes, it occurred to me that I grew an entire person in exactly that amount of time. And all I want to do is change a thing or two about my already-existing self.

What about you? What could you do with the time it takes to grow a person?

As for what it means to find two dead birds on the patio—that’s what it means. Or nothing. Or everything.

Image credit: Cedar Waxwing 2 by rctfan2 (CC BY-SA 3.0 US)

Hating Harry Potter

 

no potterI have never liked the Harry Potter series. There are two key truths related to this admission. One is simply about timing: for legitimate, if not rational, reasons, the theme of the first book reminded me of some then-recent trauma; thus a kind of guilt by association led me to hate the entire franchise. The second truth is this: I have never read the books. Nor have I watched the movies, despite being trapped in a houseful of relatives who were marathon-watching the DVDs on some Christmas past.

I am not proud of this. It makes me the worst kind of critic, declaring my disdain for an artist whose work I have never actually seen.

Sometimes I exhibit a stubborn resistance to hype, refusing to see the latest blockbusters, even if they interest me. I am usually willing to watch those movies later, when I can watch them via Netflix or Amazon Prime, rent the DVDs for a couple dollars, or borrow them, free, from the library. I even allow myself to enjoy them. (One notable exception is “Titanic.” I’d gladly pay full ticket price to have those three hours back.)

But hating Harry Potter was neither a product of bitter envy nor a rage against the Hollywood machine; it was something that anchored itself in my worldview as immutable. And a fixed worldview is a dangerous thing.

I have been working—or rather, not working—at allowing myself space to create, giving voice to whatever inspiration shows up, in whatever form. The strongest desire is usually to write, though I have been doing precious little of that, as I always seem to have at least one foot in the quicksand of self-doubt. However, once I begin keeping appointments with my muse, perhaps by writing a blog post without worrying whether it will move anyone but me, I find myself curious about the process. Not about my process, but about the process itself, which means I become curious about how other people show up at the page, and more importantly, how they keep showing up.

Eventually, this curiosity turns to wondering how long one must appease the muse before the magic shows up. And last weekend, as I wondered about the magic, I thought about how I might be able to learn a thing or two from J. K. Rowling, if I could allow some flexibility in my worldview.

I stealthily retrieved my wife’s copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from our family room bookcase and carried it into my office. Still resisting the idea of reading it, I placed the book on my desk, next to my computer, with the intention of typing the first few paragraphs of the story, to see if it evoked any kind of somatic response.

The book sat there, untouched for four days, but not unnoticed.

SUZIN: Harry Potter? Really? (grinning) Huh.

This afternoon, after meditating on the creative process, I picked up the book and sat down in a comfortable chair to discover how it all started. Except the last line of the first paragraph—which, incidentally, I did not type (until now)—was, “And he also happened to be a wizard.”

I knew enough about the story to know this was not how it started, so I flipped back to the cover page: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the series. It was in the wrong book jacket! Recalling that one of the Rowling books on our shelf was missing a jacket, I returned to the bookcase. The naked copy was book six, which sat alongside books four, five, and seven, each in its respective jacket.

Unbelievable. I am finally open to the possibility of Harry Fucking Potter, and I can’t find it. Perhaps this is the message from J. K. Rowling: “Tell your own story.”

After deciding there was no way I was going to the library to check it out, I headed to Yountville to satisfy my craving for an almond croissant from Bouchon. And since the bakery is just up the street from the Yountville Library, and I had never been to that branch…

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was not among the 273 books in the Yountville branch, but Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom was, and I had been meaning to pick it up again. Madson’s first maxim is “Say yes.”

Say yes to everything. Accept all offers. Go along with the plan. Support someone else’s dream. Say “yes”; “right”; “sure”; I will”; “okay”; “of course”; “YES!” Cultivate all the ways you can imagine to express affirmation. When the answer to all questions is yes, you enter a new world, a world of action, possibility, and adventure. (p. 27)

When I got home, I asked my stepdaughter if she happened to have Harry Potter on the bookshelf in her room. She brought it to me, and I said, “Yes.”

Did you have opportunities to say yes today? And did you?