Healing the Intellectual v. Creative rift: My Interview on the Stepping Off Now Podcast with Kendra Patterson

Annie and Kendra in 2012!!!

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.

Sovereignty after Grief

When one is in the throes of grief, it feels never-ending. In some ways, it might be. We continue to mourn for lost loved ones, lost opportunities, lost dreams. But in my experience, there is a distinct experience of closure that eventually surfaces. The only person I have seen effectively put words to this experience was the poet David Whyte in an interview with Krista Tippett, where he was discussing the unexpected death of his friend John O’Donohue. He said,

“But when he went, it was like the other half of me disappeared. And we have this physical experience in loss of falling toward something. It’s like falling in love except it’s falling into grief. You’re falling towards the foundation that they held for you in your life that you didn’t realize they were holding. And you fall and fall and fall and you don’t find it for the longest time. The shock of the loss to begin with and the hermetic sealing off is necessary in grief. But then there comes a time when you finally, actually start to touch the ground that they were holding for you. And it’s from that ground that you step off into your new life...”

I’ve spoken with some friends in grief who have experienced this falling, but I’ve yet to engage with anyone about the solid ground that you eventually find. For me, this solid ground felt like an ease or willingness to feel the full scope of my emotions, the ability to make a decision I had not been able to make for several years, returned motivation for work and creative projects, more energy and mental clarity in general, and a kind of insulation from my life. I do not mean that I am standing at a distance from my life (as Rob Bell would say). I am not. What I mean is that my own connection with myself is so profound that it seems to hold every else at a distance. There is something fundamental that is unaffected by the tides of life. 

I found this out because only a few weeks after I started to find this ground, I received some painful news, more painful than the initial cause of my grief. It was interesting to be returned so suddenly to grief, but from this new place. There wasn’t really any falling this time, which makes me wonder if sometimes crises that seem to be about other people are actually more about bringing our attention to how unstable our own foundation has become. Once I had this firmer foundation, I was capable of absorbing great loss without losing my footing. My experience suggests that if you take radical care of yourself in the years after loss, you may find a kind of sovereignty that carries you through whatever comes next.

Outside of my own internal change in state, I received various forms of confirmation externally that seemed to contain my experience and indicate that the period of mourning had closed. My son cut his forehead open a few days after the initial trauma. He split his chin open when I started to feel closure. Around that time, he also broke a crystal that I had been using to meditate with. When I texted my energy healer to ask about this, she said, “When a crystal breaks it indicates that the situation we have been meditating on has resolved.” There was about a month period where I had these types of experiences every day, something that said to me, “this phase is ending.”

I hesitate to give a time frame for this; I think it is different for everyone. But for me it was almost exactly two years from a trauma. I’ve heard that for many people it takes three years, but I am relatively young and have lots of resources—material and otherwise—so it makes sense that the timeline was shortened in my case. In the coming weeks I plan to write a series on grief and resources. I already have one post about the things that were helpful to me in the first year. I’d like to identify some good self-care resources in and near Oxford, OH for my colleagues. I’d like to discuss free forms of self-care for those who have fewer resources or are interested in the simplest approach to healing. And I’d like to talk about the stages of grief as I experienced them, since they did not correspond to the traditional stages. In the meantime, if you are in a season of grief, I hope my experience strengthens your own hope that you will soon find your footing, maybe sooner than you expect.

Peace and love.