What do you like most about your life right now?

Space. No work I absolutely must do. No definitive claims on my time. Freedom. A growing sense of divestment from my preconceived notions of how things have to look and seem.  It's empowering but often highly unsettling. For the past several days I've struggled a bit to find the usual limiting, sometimes encroaching metaphorical walls of imagined obligation and self-imposed polarities of choice to place my palms against and they just aren't there. They seem to have fallen away. What's left is a richness of creative possibility that can be paralyzing but wants simply to be felt and met and leaned into, in a bodily way really. The succession of choices has a voice that wants to be invigorating but can be so daunting:
Do I try to write poetry? Prose poems? Pieces of remembrance that might become part of a larger memoir sometime? the beginnings of short fiction?
Or do I work on my photography? Begin organizing and assembling images to go along with my own words in some initial halting semblance of a narrative or theme-based project?
Or do I really get into collage art more fully? Take the handbuilt sculpture class I've always wanted to? Begin putting all the funky textures and fabrics and hunks of wood and cloth and metal and stone and sand and glass that I've collected into assemblages and patterns that may give them new energy, new power, new shadows and shapes?
People like Dawn inspire me with their energy and what seems to be not necessarily focus but the willingness to move along without the mandate of focus. I can do this sometimes but it generally takes externally imposed goals and structure. What I want now is to learn what helps me just do what my creative heart yearns for. Not in a linear way necessarily, but perhaps in the sloppy, tangential, branch-y way that feels right for me. The problem (for me) with coming at creative work with this allowance in mind is that things tend to get abandoned or ignored or forgotten about or neglected or completed in a slipshod, half-assed manner. So what I seem to need is a way to allow myself what my students would call "random-ness" without the negative self-expectations and scripts. And, of course, that means finding ways to follow through consistently and yet playfully, without the onus of that stern imagined voice tapping a metaphorical watch and demanding I finish up right now. (I'd appreciate it if anyone has any ideas or experience with this stuff.)
One thing I have learned (or re-learned) recently is that for me, creative energy needs to be sparked and cultivated physically. Engendered in a sensory way, awakened by a reminder of how that energy feels and hears and tastes and smells and sings and sees the world's body's language in a reciprocity of immense grace and presence. This experience is not always pleasant but it does mean being awake. It means getting out of my head and into everything Else. It seems that the head part comes back around if I begin to do this, to be more present in my body's experience of its world in a moment to moment way. One of my favorite ways to do this is to get my feet wet in running water. It is better just to go ahead and submerge and float and even swim, though. Eating fresh fruit slowly is a good one too. Thich Naht Hanh wrote about chewing milk, how he would soak bread in milk and eat it so that every bite was a slow koan of texture and flavor. He didn't rush it. He just let his mouth have the milk and the bread. A sacrament of bodiliness that was so simple and so grounding.
I think I'll go sit with my feet and legs in Talking Rock Creek and eat some fresh blackberries. See where their prickly purple flavor and the gurgle of the creekwater around twigs and stranded pinestraw takes me. Maybe swing as high as I can on the swings there, until it feels like I'm about to make some kind of circle complete.

lks 6/29/09