I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about my creative process, trust, doubt, and muddling through until a miracle happens. It’s about how sometimes you might be procrastinating - but sometimes you’re just waiting for kairos.
See, over and over again, I’ll work on a project and then run out of inspiration. I’ll run out of any of the get-up-and-go that it takes to get it across the finish line. This often happens when I’m somewhere between 70 and 95 percent finished with a project. The creative flow just dries up.
Before you say it, yes, I’ve heard all the advice. Inspiration doesn’t matter, it’s hard work that gets things across the finish line. The muse will come, but she has to find you working. Push through, maximum effort, just show up over and over again, it doesn’t matter what your mood about the work is, just do it.
That advice has a time and a place. Honestly, a lot of the work I’ve turned out by following it has been sub-par (this article, most of what’s below, is one example), but at least it was, you know, finished. That’s something.
But there is another kind of work; work that requires very different advice. Sometimes, you feel the creative stream dry up, and you hear a whisper in your bones — wait.
I follow that whisper quite often. It’s served me well again and again.
Over and over in my creative work, I’ve paused a project, stepped away for a week, a month, a quarter — and then suddenly, gliding slantways out of nowhere, something unexpected shows up. A friend uses a strange turn of phrase, or I happen across an article, a bit of terminology, a dream, a painting convention from the early renaissance. Whatever it is, I suddenly feel a click, and that whisper in my bones — it let’s out a sigh of satisfaction. The wait is over.
If I had tried to force the project across the finish line before encountering this final piece, it wouldn’t have been whole. It would have been missing something critical. It would have limped the earth with a malformed tongue and milky-white eyes. I needed that final piece, and that final piece could only come at the opportune moment. It could only come with kairos.
There are a lot of examples — my article on the one essential quality, metis, is a good one, that one had to wait awhile for its final pieces — but one of the recent examples is Li Journaling.
Last year, I was asked to put together a workshop for a writing course I was taking. Because I’m the Somatic Resonance Guy™, they asked me to do something in the area of writing from a place of embodied awareness.
I tried out a few exercises, combining somatic meditation and writing in various ways. They were fine. Meditative writing is rarely bad. But the exercises weren’t anything special.
So I shook it off and stopped trying to write something that felt On-Brand™, I just started working with what felt interesting to me. Lately, I’d been feeling that somatic practice is so often about obviousness for me. I decided to lean into that.
Starting from a sense of physiological obviousness, I tuned into my body: my heart is beating, my feet are cold, my right hip is a little stiff; I felt it all, letting it take stage, all the obvious stuff that isn’t usually worth noticing.
From there, I let awareness expand to my emotions, the obvious feelings that aren’t usually worth noticing. A little wistfulness here, tension there, a remembered joy at the edges.
And then, the main event: I turned my awareness — now tuned to the scent of obvious facts of existence — and nudged it in the direction of a question I’d been musing on lately. The exact question doesn’t matter — I think the first time was something about soul retrieval.
It was like a lightning strike. The conscious energy from above, the unconscious from below, they slammed together into a clear and radiant path of pure obviousness. Things that I’d known before, but kept beneath awareness, sprung up in front of me. New connections came through, a hazy set of ideas suddenly clarified into something new and crystal clear.
As I started writing down the lightning strike — writing piece by piece, then closing my eyes and returning to the sense of the obvious, waiting for the next piece to cohere — I felt it moving through my body, a twisting movement in my torso. I had to shake it out, sitting in my chair. My body was rearranging to the energy I’d put on the move.
It was a weirdly powerful practice; I hadn’t anticipated it going so well.
I tried it out on a couple more people, then gave my presentation for the writing group, trying out the exercise on them. Reviews were similar across the board: a sudden conscious realization of things they’d known deep down, but hadn’t ever recognized before.
I wanted to give the exercise a name. It was getting cumbersome to call it “this journaling project I’m working on about the nature of obviousness in the body and how you can bring the unconscious into conscious awareness through somatic inquiry and writing.”
It was a lazy process. A week or two of on and off noodling with names and acronyms, eventually settling on “Li Journaling,” short for Latent Insight Journaling.
I wasn’t really sure why I liked the word “li” for this — it felt familiar, and I had a vague sense that it was the name for some kind of underlying cosmic order in Confucianism. I couldn’t recall more than that, so I just went with it.
Soon after that, I was in a reading group for Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, and we came across a long section on li, describing it as an “Essential Principle of Flow,” a universal patterning-impulse woven into all things, preceding and underlying all things.
Already, this rang true with my sense of my journaling method — this sense of getting in touch with a deeper pattern of Life was congruent with my experience of seeking the obvious — and I kept digging a little further.
McGilchrist’s book led me to David Wade’s work on “Li Patterns,” which he describes again and again as the repeating natural patterns that occur when energy and form interact in different ways. “The common factor in all these processes is, as ever, the transfer of energy; these delicate forms should be seen as energy pathways.”
These interactions of form and energy give us recognizable sets of non-repeating patterns that show up in everything from drainage basins to the veins of a leaf to feathers to beehives to the cramped irregular spirals of a cross-sectioned cabbage. The way that energy and material interact create reliable li patterns.
Somehow, this deep dive clarified what I was getting at with my “journaling on obviousness” project.
Not only in the physical world, but in the inner world as well, form and energy play out, they leave patterns, they evidence themselves and the paths they’ve taken. They leave marks.
Archetypes, for example, are essentially li patterns of human psychic energy. They’re the shapes that certain types of interactions fall into over an over again, due to natural law. The King archetype is open to infinite variation, but always falls into a recognizable pattern — somehow, the way that power, society, individual worries, and local circumstances press against each other, it all creates roughly recognizable energy pathways, roughly similar patterns that we respond to in roughly similar ways, again and again, millennium after millenium.
It’s the same for smaller psychic processes as well, not just archetypes. If we slow down, drop into the body, attune ourselves to the patterns of the obvious — everything we think and feel leaves its trace. It’s all there, waiting for us to pay attention to it. To notice the obvious fact of it.
Most of these are small. You might notice that you’re irritated today, and it’s made you standoffish from your cat. You may notice that this is very silly. You may pet your cat, to make sure your mood isn’t making him anxious as well. Quiet, daily moments like this.
They may also be bigger. You might notice that it’s been a very difficult couple of months for you, and it’s made you standoffish from your family. Snappish, even. You may notice that this isn’t just silly, it’s potentially eroding the relationships you count on the most, just when you need them the most. You may realize there are some steps you can take to untangle this situation, to change the pattern.
It’s the same pattern, in both cases; just at different scales, in different areas. The form and energy are different, but they’re interacting in the same ways, leaving the same traces.
Once you can stop, slow down, and attune to the obvious, it gets much easier to recognize these patterns in yourself. Once you’ve recognized it in one interaction, it will be that much more obvious next time, even at a different scale, woven from different materials; the pattern stays unmistakable. And the counter-pattern shows itself.
I shared the journaling exercise a few times, early on, out of a sense that “maybe it’s not finished, but you just gotta keep plugging away, keep working, keep putting it out there; working hard is more important than waiting for inspiration.”
But in this project, like many, many, many others — working hard on it just doesn’t make up the deficit. Sometimes, it takes patience. It takes kairos. You can stay attentive to the appearance of the missing pieces, but you can’t just summon them into being by grinding away at the task.
Some things just don’t work that way. It’s not their pattern.
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