“Everything matters; slow down and pay attention and let the universe come to you like a shy, wild animal sniffing its way in circles towards you.” -Jean Rhode on Sense Writing
Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity #2.
Many of us, when we were little, were afraid of the dark. A night light somehow kept us safe—protected in its circle of brightness from whatever unrecognizable wonders might be lurking on the periphery.
We might have gotten less scared as we’ve grown older, or maybe even embraced the idea that there might be something we want to know out there in the borders of our awareness.
But whether the dark is literal—cold and quiet winter months—or figurative—the world’s scary turbulence or the depths of our own worries or imaginations—it’s often too easy to stay in our bubble and avoid the rest.
It’s harder to imagine that darkness is necessary, that it could even be inviting and creative. Intriguing and mysterious rather than imposing or menacing.
In the last blog, I mentioned the relationship between nature and creative process (which makes up the botanical framework of the 12-week course).
We spoke about how we still tend to forget about the darker parts—and how, if we look at our creative process as an ecology that includes all parts of ourselves, one that’s truly sustainable, we can’t leave out the murky, unknown, and mysterious ones.
What Gets Lost in the Light
Today, I want to talk about darkness as a bigger picture: not how to endure it, but why it’s a crucial part of the ecology of creativity itself.
When we’re so quick to grab a flashlight to dispel the darkness (and our fear), we can only see what's lit up. Anything beyond that lit-up circle becomes darker, more impenetrable.
In staving off the unfamiliar or unknown at the edges, we lose the mystery of what might show itself from the periphery—the same mysterious unknown that nourishes our creative power.
What if, instead, we sat still in the midst of what we don’t know, instead of lighting it up? If we’re patient and trusting, we know: our eyes will naturally adjust. The darkness becomes more sensed, a multifaceted part of the ecosystem: the soil, the night, the waiting inside of an acorn—all of it part of a dynamic whole. Our capacity grows.
And what we so often forget is that this expansion is actually pleasurable, not frightening. As our capacity grows, our words and our actions emerge.
Collaborating in the Dark
Thinking about sitting with the unknown in this way makes me think of my time as a young theater artist after September 11, when New York City was brewing with raw emotion, colossal grief, and disconnection.
In that landscape, I found myself teaching English to a group of Japanese women (living in New York because of their businessman husbands) who were shy about speaking a new language.
They had studied English, but in moving from worksheets to words, they got stuck. They were so afraid of making mistakes that they couldn’t speak up at all.
In between grammar lessons, to help them feel more comfortable speaking, I did theater exercises with them, and eventually long-form improvisations where they felt freer to speak English—as characters—without the fear of messing up.
These improvisations eventually evolved and the characters developed, and I was struck by the charged, broken language and the deep silences of the women. A new syntax was emerging, and I was mesmerized. I began to write down the scenes that eventually became plays, performed in theaters in the shadow of the former World Trade Center.
During that particular moment in history, what we created evolved so organically, word by word, scene by scene, with each other and the limitations that we couldn’t name.
The ”failures,” the mistakes—ultimately letting things be what they were—created a new world.
When the actors stepped into them, the performances had a rawness and vulnerability that captured the feeling we were all wading in at the time. Full of silence and rupture, this theater communicated a specific experience that felt universal to audiences whose own language felt out of reach.
The complex ecology of that moment—the griefs, my own and others, the joys of discovery, the community—was inseparable from what came out of it.
The form would never have emerged out of something “lighter.” If I had immediately corrected my students instead of collaborating with them, it would have stayed buried. If I had rushed the process instead of slowing down to sense it, I never would have grown the capacity to recognize what I had never seen before.
Our capacity is both the seed and the canopy of our creative process. And expanding it doesn’t happen in a moment.
In the next blog, you’ll learn more about the science of how that capacity works on a foundational level— the body and nervous system— and you’ll get to experience how it feels when you tap into that level of the body and nervous system and let the edges of what we can truly see expand.
