Encountering life

The old Kentish hop fields that surround the town where I live have gradually been replanted with row upon row of grapevines. New vineyards are opening all the time. It’s a slow consequence of our changing climate. At this time of year, with all the grapes harvested, the work of pruning is about to start. 

There is a great art to this pruning, I’m told. Each vine needs to be cut back in its own way, and the vines that produced the most fruit this summer are the ones that need to be pruned back the hardest now. This is what ensures a sweet and abundant crop next year. 

When my friend told me about this, I couldn’t help but think in metaphor – it’s just an occupational hazard for someone who writes as much as I do. If I were to give my creative life a “hard pruning” – a cutting away of the old in preparation for the new – what would I be left with? What gave me fruit in the past but now needs to be gone, and, more importantly, what is the living rootstock that remains? 

The word I arrived at was encounter. In his classic book of essays The Courage to Create, the psychotherapist Rollo May argues that the fulfilment we find in our creative activities – which are essential to our health – depends not on the quality of what we produce but on the depth of the engagement with our practice. This is what he calls, somewhat mysteriously, the “encounter”. 

If we try to create things through a force of will, we won’t find fulfilment, he writes. What we need to do is “give ourselves to the encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment.” And what is it we are meant to encounter? Life itself. Creativity is about “the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world,” says May. 

If you avoid or refuse the encounter, or don’t make it with intensity, “you will have betrayed yourself,” he writes. And what’s more, “...you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.” 

Betrayal is a heavy word, but the idea behind it is enlivening: the world needs to hear from you – we need to experience the unique things that you are here to create. 

If that’s the case – and I think it is – why would we not commit to this encounter? Because to engage in creative activity we need to “defy the gods” that are worshipped by most people in our culture, namely the gods of apathy, material success and exploitative power. 

That takes courage – which can be hard to find and sustain, especially if you feel like it’s just you against the gods. 

The poet Mary Oliver offers a simple yet powerful way forward in her “instructions” for living: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. And as she says, there’s one big question the world throws at us every morning: “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

As we move into the darkest part of the year, and the pruning begins, here’s my plan: to keep encountering life with a brave heart, in my own way, in my own time, trusting that the world wants to hear from me, and I have something to say. 

If you’re planning something similar, then we are in this together, and I wish you bon courage.  

Neil 

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I’m gathering a small group of people in the new year to explore how we might deepen our creative encounter with life – it might be a single gathering or something that unfolds over several weeks. And I have space to work with a few people one-to-one. If either speaks to you, send me an email and we can explore what would feel right.

Featured image is a photo of a vineyard via Unsplash