I had the great honor of being interviewed by long-time friend (and lifeline) Kendra Patterson. The episode posted this morning. In the conversation, we discussed my creative practice, the ways that I prepare to enter a flow state, my teaching philosophy, whether my practices are “creative” or “spiritual,” how I (don’t) identify with labels like writer or creative, and the current state of our institutions and concepts.

Listening back to the episode, I realized how the conversation itself had been a part of my own healing process. Since my early twenties, when I entered graduate school, I have had a tenuous relationship with intellectualism. While I was drawn to the depth that I thought the academy would offer, I found that most of my companions on the route were approaching but not really diving into the human experience. They were striving to produce something “in genre,” that is, largely following templates that dictated what knowledge would look like. I often found their questions uninteresting, the answers they offered obvious or convenient and guided by a pretentious concern for methodology with too little concern for substance.

Meanwhile, among the poets, David Whyte was calling me to ask beautiful questions:

“John [O’Donohue] used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

[The real “beautiful question” is if Ann Wainscott can write a blog post without citing David Whyte…]

The way I reacted to this tension was to build two different lives, one academic, the other poetic, romantic, sustaining. The conflict is reflected in my Twitter bio: “mystic masquerading as political scientist; not fooling anyone.” The point is that I started to bifurcate - divide my life into two spheres. It was a survival mechanism. I bracketed my respect for the mystery of life, relegated it to my writing or flower-arranging practice, re-fashioned my interest in how religion shapes meaning-making systems into a historical institutionalist analysis of Moroccan counter-terror policies [come on, you’ve got to admit that was impressive LOL], soothed my spirit with On Being podcasts and skinny-dipping in the poetry of the mystics, and did fieldwork in breathtaking places like Morocco or Senegal, interviewing bureaucrats and intellectuals with one eye on the respondent and the other on the brilliant bougainvillea growing over the wall of the nearby garden.

It wasn’t sustainable. But it worked for a season.

Lately, working my way through Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, it became harder and harder to maintain this separation. Her damning critique of what she calls “The Ivory Power,” broke me and buoyed me, for naming the undeniably catastrophic impact many “creativity” programs have had on young artists. I wonder how many young writers’ motivation I have destroyed, by being too critical in my response, too strict with unnecessary conventions, too caught up in my own questions to recognize the beauty in theirs.

I will confess that these spheres are still so separate that I was even surprised when Kendra began to ask me about my teaching, as if that is irrelevant to my own creative practice. Something about the way she wove the two together "moved me back and forth into the change,” as Rilke says - in my life poem. It was fun, even, reflecting on what I am doing in the classroom, how I have tried to redeem my own disappointing educational experiences, what it looks like when a class “works,” who is doing the creating in a classroom, etc. The conversation helped me to recognize how for many years the classroom was my creative outlet.

There was a relevant angle of my experience that wasn’t fully captured by this conversation though, that readers of this blog will immediately recognize. Because the topic of the conversation was creativity, it was not clear how many of my practices play a dual purpose - processing grief and facilitating flow. Kendra is right to point out that I have a lot of practices. I’ve been in an experimental state for a long-time, about three years now, and most of the practices that we discuss were actually embraced not to facilitate a writing practice, but to help me get out of bed in the morning. And if I had to chose, I’d say that the majority of my practices are primarily grief-related, not for the purposes of creativity. But I don’t have to chose; they can serve both purposes.

My point is that intense periods of mourning or transition require more grounding practices than stable periods. Personally, I am coming to a place of greater stability now. I know many of my current practices are probably no longer necessary, but I am going to let the new normal arise organically, in its own time, rather than force some sort of transition prematurely. The connections between grief and creativity are myriad, already well-documented and explored by others, but I do suspect that the healing potential of participation in “the flow” is over-looked, and under-valued by most of us. Here’s to hoping that Kendra and I record a second conversation some day, digging into the beautiful questions at the frontier of grief and creativity.