There is a great joy and ecstasy in the creative process. Countless possibilities branch out wildly from every action; one is filled with excitement and becomes absorbed to the extent of losing oneself. There is a deep satisfaction which resonates long after the act. This is one of several life experiences one can't forget.
There is an equally significant experience of agony that can befall the individual whose natural propensity for creative expansion is artificially curtailed, such as from the influence of an oppressive external authority, or even living in an environment that is creatively impoverished. Woe to the society that experiences the tragedy of universal creative oppression and impoverishment, whose participants experience a universal attenuation of their propensities for creative expansion.
To call this the winter phase of our civilization's life cycle is all too apt. It is a phase in which creative life increasingly approaches a frozen state. There is an end of creative expansion. Day to day life for the cultural mainstream involves getting from one pleasurable sensation to the next, devoid of context or long-term awareness. The cultural mainstream becomes frozen into a familiar pattern, stuck on repeat, while the underground continues to flourish underneath, though it runs on very low amounts of energy. Life continues on weakly under a ceiling, as if under a blanket of snow.
Life always finds a way however. Tupac noted this dynamic in one of his greatest lyrical moments when he imagined a rose growing up through cracked concrete, albeit with damaged petals. Concrete happened to be very apt: a frozen, dead state of matter laid over life, upon which greater material advancement is to be built further upon. Consider the impoverished populations capitalist societies are built on. Nevertheless, life manages to continue its creative path, up through concrete, up through snow, flourishing in cycles that ancients once charted on earth and in planet motions in the skies above. Creative winters give way to creative springs. Strange that life flourishes so vividly on landscapes of decay and disintegration; it seems life has some secret love of assembling structure from chaos.
It was once the case that we followed those most intense, most fierce, whose methods of survival and creative expansion were carved like grooves into our conceptions of what is possible, until there arose those who amassed enough power to freeze their favored state of affairs in place, amassing ever more power on a predictable landscape.
But it could be different. There is a great joy and freedom in limiting one's own creative power so that others may have room to expand, others that can be celebrated and loved, and stepping aside to let life do what it will.
