What if our creative dreams are not where we think they are?!

T is for Trickster.

That ole riley crafty coyote, playing tricks on us, running us around in circles, and turning everything upside down.

From one of my all time favourite films I can hear Indiana Jones saying: “What if we are digging in the wrong place??!!” Aaah Indy you beautiful man! :-)

But, what if we are my dear creative creatures?!

What if we have been so focused on one telescopic point of view, one perfectly lit dream, one intangible bubble wrapped pearl of ‘this is what it looks like’, that when we finally take the pin of reality to burst the helium protected sac, and this dream thing that we have held up, adored, spoken of with idolatry, looked up to like the god of freedom is in our hands, well, well, we are stopped dead in our tracks?!

You see for so many of us we pin the tail to the wrong donkey.

I’m not necessarily calling our dreams donkeys! ;-).
Donkey dreams. Dream donkeys. It’s getting a lil weird now non!?

But we may quite possibly have spent so much time, hours, months, years, decades even, dusting and holding tight onto something that either no longer resonates or has any meaning with who we are now, or was never ours to begin with! Our father’s unmet desire to be a landscape artist. Our mother’s unrealised dream to be an actor. Somehow in the strange salt and pepper mix of twisted familial karma, we can end up having to be the housekeeper and caretaker of something that has nothing to do with us. That’s quite shocking, and pretty sobering to be honest!

Or when we finally have the courage to hold our dream and test it in the bread and butter realness of the cold light of day, we may find that it has dissolved, no longer that which has kept us under its promised spell for far too long. That’s quite shocking too. To feel the texture of disillusionment, disbelief, and that pervasive sense of, ‘now what!?’.

But the thing is, rather a shock and a shake and a ‘what the fuck!?’ than living the rest of our lives in the delusion of illusion. Here we get a chance to start afresh. To ask of ourselves what it is we really dream of or maybe, just maybe, to drop the hiding behind a ‘dream’ and instead to live.

To live.

To take the proverbial bull by the horns and run with it.

Into the great forests of not knowing, through the mountain mystery, over the dark void infinite depths of oceans. You get my drift.

There can be an uncanny sense of relief once the initial shock has calmed down and removed its slapping palm from our reddened cheek. A relief from the putting down the belief in ‘this is what is should look like’. A freedom. A liberation.

A pass and an open door into the limitless land of creativity. When we put down our pressurised shrunk idea that I am only an artist if I paint my way to a grand retrospective, write a New York Times bestseller, launch a number one selling album etc., then we have the whole realm to play out in. New creative ideas and forms to make friends with, to get to know, to explore, to play with.

We are creative beings because that’s just what we are. Trickster is great at kicking our ego-ed ass and sometimes we need it. Sometimes, his spinning us around might just mean, when the dust has settled, that we begin to dig in exactly the right place at last! :-)