LIPSTICKMOTO

It was a while back, listening to a Ted talk somewhere in Nevada. Road trip inspiration, driving on a highway through a martian landscape. This particular only twelve minute Ted Talk I’ve listened to probably a dozen times on being a “ multipotentialite” my messy Monkey hit me hard. It went something like this in my head for about five minutes…messy.

Cue my monkey brain…

Hey, that’s me, I am a multipotentialite, but you knew that already, silly! She’s talking about those intersections of life, or skill and idea leading to Venn diagrams of thought and process right? How do those come together for me? Venn diagrams are cool you can have a billion circles if you needed to. They make flowers, and flowers are pretty with those circular centers of theirs where it all comes together…

Circles?

I was just chatting about Enso circles with my kiddo for her Buddhist art class…they practice them thousands of times.

Sometimes an Enso is not completely closed, sometimes it is. What about that Buddhist notion of leaving space open for the creation of possibility and the beauty in the incomplete, yes I can get into being incomplete. But sometimes, there has to be space, we have to be open…How long does it take for us to free up space to create something new? Free up space…can we? Wasn’t Enzo the dog from the Art of Racing in the Rain???

Then my manic monkey runs up a tree where I can’t see or reach him, for a nap.

Thoughts sit for a few days and about a thousand miles before I can write out those monkey notes…

Sitting on a vetiver velvet love seat in color and smell, the combination of old books and foreign black tea. Waiting for my Fairy Godmother to take us to dinner…rough life for sure. The curtain I see, an Enso circle. Serendipity of course, time to write a bit frantically while I wait. I could feel thoughts coming together and hurried to put them on paper.

Do you remember as I do, the first time you found yourself staring at the still bubbled rounded, convex monitor wondering how long this process of making  space was going to take before you could use the damn computer again? That estimated time bar on the bottom of the window that was never just a simple countdown? It would go up, it would go down. It would estimate days or hours…The countdown to creativity can’t be that simple either. Defragging the computer, staring at the little lines, those tiny little color blips in a row matching themselves with their counterparts. Somehow I always found it satisfying knowing that each piece would find a place where they fit in. That time clock shifting up and down, me with no ability to make sense of any of it. Just trying to be patient. And with each attempt at creating space, it took…less time. It became a habit, and I began to enjoy knowing that there was space and organization at least somewhere.

I’ve always struggled with the rearranging of the toy box, putting away the Legos. But once neatly stacked and color coordinated there is room in that very same toy box for the Tonka truck that couldn’t fit before.  We make room to use even if we don’t know what we are going to use it for… yet. We intentionally make space all the time.

Creating space for your mind though, that is no small undertaking. Write. Meditate. Dream. Cry. Laugh. Sweat. Ride. Whatever the process we use to defrag doesn’t really matter, but taking the time to organize your inner workings can’t be quick, that would be too easy. The arbitrary countdown of how long it is going to take to get it all together has to be ignored, it is not an exact science after all. Sometimes it doesn’t take too long, if we practice. Sometimes though, when we have been scattered all around it takes five ever. If we are lucky as we organize our thoughts and selves we find seeds we thought we had lost for years, but we may not remember what it was they would grow. But we can nurture them once again if we want to, now that we found them. That’s the cool part, really.

My Venn diagrams, my Enso circles are coming together these days as I have recognized that I am always going to be a work in progress. I am finally embracing imperfection and the incomplete. In doing so, finding connections between worlds that were seemingly unrelated has become almost a second nature lately. Like seeing the intersection of the process of defragging a computer or cleaning out a closet as it relates to a Buddhist concept because of a Ted talk…

There is beauty in the spaces. Those cracks are where the light gets in, like morning sun through a curtain you didn’t quite close, reminding us of another day. When there is space to let the light in, to let your mind wander, you can see. Maybe it’s the overlays…the mesh of idea and process producing that illusive coming together in our mind that spawns the next great idea. Or maybe when there is space, we can finally see what might fit there that we didn’t realize before. When I finally give myself space, I feel ideas touching and reaching for each other, coming together if only for a brief flash. These sparks remind me to keep looking for, and creating space instead of just filling it to fill it. I may not know now what I am going to be when/if I ever grow up, but now I know that I have to be open, look through the cracks, let some light in and hope the intersections find me.