on the moment as collaborator

each day this week i sat down to write this, i wrote about the unending drawl of january light, the way it felt to be in reverence on bright day MLK day the after march glow watching the interfaith council using the words of Dr, King to travel across time, the disorganized despair as this new administration blusters it’s way into existence. in other words, i can’t quite spit it out. i find myself not finishing sentences. i watch as those who know me well patiently wait for the words to make their way through the pinball machine in my mind.

this reality exists at the same time as i take a songwriting class with Brian Eno and fall into the endless possibility of what creativity and play might offer.

which led me to this train of thought, what if we understood adversity to be our collaborator? what if this collaborator opened up possibility for response that brings us more alive and more able to respond? not in a glib, all is good, and there is a positive opportunity in everything but more like some kind of new navigation of what is where we don’t know the answers already.

what if in this place that we can see the trap doors, the secret passage ways, the ways through? because we need to. we want to. we have vastness.

in a talk with a friend last week about los angeles and the way creative communities have been one of the groups hit hard in these fires she talked about what opportunity might come from a reorganization, what kinds of recognition and aknowledgement lie there.

i tend to be more on the Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism and shock doctrine end of things myself, meaning these shocks (fires, floods, authoritarian regimes) break the systems of accountability and offer a place for power to be consolidated by power-hungry-rich actors that reform ways of being into systems that offer more profits, more power to limited few.

but as the week went on and event and event offered fresh opportunity for heartbreak, i realized that something else was stirring too. it was an urge to sort everything into something that made sense. i do this in emergencies, i get organized, because that kind of response allows action. it is effective but blunt and limited in its scope.

i watch this kind of response show up other places and am skeptical.

when i reach the part of the creative project in the studio where i am sorting to make sense i know it is time to take a break because i have lost the thread of aliveness. my mind has returned to a yes-no kind of machine that wants it to be this or that, and in that i have lost what is the animating force of what i am doing.

i noticed that this is how i responded this week while bombarded with thing and after thing regardless of the tenor of the event. this might have something to do with how unravelled my attention is in the midst of the various storms at play in our world.

but i think there is another aspect at play. when i start sorting i miss the aliveness of collaborating with the moment. the collaborating moment is often awkward, lumpy, and frustrating but it is inherently full of possibilities and unexpected outcomes.

this moment doesnt mean that decisions wont be made or that a yes or a no are appropriate at some points but it does relieve me from knowing. it does recognize scale. it asks for aliveness. it looks for the places that thaw and move.

im curious where you find this? and what happens? and what you become when the world is this shape?