During my transition from Textile Design career to professional organizer I wandered upon a meandering path and came to recognize the beauty of not having an exact direction or total clarity. There were moments of utter darkness and chaos and moments of magnificent beauty and peace.
This transition was a time of loss of lifestyle, community, career, family and of our 3 kitties. We felt very alone, but we wanted something different so we embarked upon an adventure of risk. There was a period of 18 months that I had no JOB, leaving me with a lot of time to feel like all I had ahead was more chaos and lack of direction. I knew with my intuition that this would change and that if I could find a way to embrace the “dark night of the soul” that I could be transformed. This dark period felt chaotic as my mind argued that this was crazy and we would not make it. This poem by the Sufi Mystic Hafiz is fitting.
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God…
The beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.
What on earth had we done? We invited ourselves to be turned upside down! We choose to put ourselves on this new path because we had a vision of something better! After darkness always follows light.
Having emerged now from this period of darkness I see how profoundly rich and fertile a time it was. I often think of the time’s of “Darkness” as a time of being empty but I now realize that the process of creativity is one of emptying and giving birth. Darkness is a time to let ideas grow and take root, to find stillness and prepare for the birthing of great creations to come. I am finally learning to embrace the creative process that cycles through chaos, darkness, emptiness and the birthing of new ideas and creations .
The Goddess Chaos (Eris) birthed all of creation and she will tell you nothing is more chaotic than birth but the result is a creation miracle!