I love, no adore, this quote, appended below, from Elizabeth Gilbert (author of eat, pray, love) in her new book “The Signature of All Things”. It’s relevant to include it here, as it illustrates the theme of recent blog posts: allowing acceptance of the voices that come. Maybe they wake us in the middle of the night, or perhaps it’s at the moment we rise up from that darkness of night and into the sometimes tenuous and raw vulnerability of morning.
Whenever those voices come, they teach us we would not know the courage to move forward had we first not known fear. So much would be missing from the world without the life-giving blood of anger and the force for which it propels us into positive change. It is the yin and the yang of life and one aspect will always be in relationship with it’s complementary aspect — fear and courage, anger and change, for example. And like the proverbial grain of sand that transforms into an iridescent pearl, our lives are a continual evolutionary dance of sand and pearl.
“I live a creative life, and you can’t be creative without being vulnerable. I believe that Creativity and Fear are basically conjoined twins; they share all the same major organs, and cannot be separated, one from the other, without killing them both. And you don’t want to murder Creativity just to destroy Fear! You must accept that Creativity cannot walk even one step forward except by marching side-by-side with its attached sibling of Fear.
i feel so lucky to have found your inspiring blog. i am amazed at the wisdom i find here. this last one speaks profoundly. we humans want our cake yet eat it too, life shows us “no no it ain’t gonna happen” this happens over and over when we are kids. we don’t grow up into adults until we learn to accept this. once we do it changes everything.
That’s a pretty powerful quote!
Liz Gilbert is awesome, Jen, and so powerful for all of us to see that even a writer of her caliber, has the same vulnerabilities that we all do.
Thank you so much, James! I really do aim to inspire others in their journey, so I appreciate the validation.
I gave some thought to what you wrote, and smiled at the notion that perhaps sometimes we are, as adults, just having a more sophisticated elongated version of a tantrum. :-)