Creative courage

[alonewiththemoon]

Courage is paradoxical.  It asks us to risk something; but what do we risk?  Not our real selves.  We cannot lose what truly belongs to us.  Creative courage, then, implies only that we risk our easy answers and comfortable patterns for the sake of discovery.  And the true purpose of this risk-taking is to separate the wheat from the chaff in our inner makeup.  Within us lies an inner measure, the capacity to discriminate between integrity and falsehood.  Through creative risk-taking, we are asked to place in question, to release, that which is merely our automatic or learned characteristics--for the sake of growth and discovering our inner nature.  Though we may feel fear, we know from deep within that we must reorder our inner nature and loosen the dominance of our ego and false personality.  We are only risking the outer layers of conditioning that serve to hide us from ourselves.

Clearly, then, creativity requires courage.  Not arrogance, or false bravado, or pretension of any kind, but genuine courage.  The kind of courage that risks almost everything we know--in order to grow and expand and become what we are.

p174, The Widening Stream:  the Seven Stages of Creativity, by David Ulrich

I try.
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Comments

[kami-yasha.livejournal.com]

That is very much in line with something I just read in, "Directing Actors" by Judith Weston.

[nepenthedreams]

perfect timing for this quote.