Creativity and the Cosmos

In this episode, author T. Thorn Coyle explores the intricate relationship between creativity and the cosmos, emphasizing the importance of conscious creation and the role of artists in society. Through personal reflections and insights, Coyle encourages listeners to connect with their creativity and the world around them, especially during challenging times. The conversation highlights the transformative power of art and the necessity of taking risks in the creative process.

Transcript

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Hello, welcome to another solo episode of Magic, Creativity, and Life. My name is T. Thorn Coyle, and this podcast is made possible by the generosity of my Patreon supporters. I give thanks to all of you who support me every month on Patreon, support my writing, and this podcast, and other projects I'm working on. You're awesome. And if you're not yet a patron, feel free to join in at patreon.com backslash thorn Coyle. In personal news, I am still writing the Stars of Power book, which is nonfiction based on the pentacles. And I'm really finding this process of working on that book to be very rich and deep. And it's intriguing to me how much my relationship with these tools has shifted over the past two decades and how much I've integrated them into my daily, everyday life. And that really shifts my perspective on them, just having that longevity. So I'm really enjoying that. And I hope folks are going to enjoy that when it comes out in the fall as well. The Kickstarter for The Winding Road has one more week as I record this. It'll probably just be wrapping up or have just wrapped up. as this podcast goes out. So I thank everyone who supported that as well. Now, this show is based upon a reading I did recently for the Portland Literary Arts. And I thought that would be a great topic. It's about creativity and the cosmos and our relationship. from our creativity to the cosmos. And I thought it would be a really great thing to read here today. So I'm gonna do some reading from it, maybe talk about the topic afterwards. We'll see what happens. But it's from my Sigil Magic book and... I just encourage you to listen and see how resonant it feels to you or not. So, creation and the cosmos. Not all acts of creation are magic, but all acts of magic are either creation or destruction. When we join magic with creation, we increase our power and our ability to see our intentions made manifest. Some people engage in acts of creation and destruction without consciousness. I don't consider these to be acts of magic. For me, magic is the marriage of breath, will and desire. Without active conscious will, I'm not a magic worker standing in my center and making my wishes known to all the worlds. I'm just another person acting willy-nilly. and either suffering or avoiding the consequences, be they good or bad. Other people say they are working magic when what they are doing is enacting rituals. These rituals may serve great purposes. Rituals can center us, can remind us to pay attention to the sacred, can build community, and can honor gods, goddesses, or ancestors. For a ritual to be magic, However, it needs to have both intention and the will to back it up. Magic, no matter how subtle or strong, has power. And power is the energy to do. Therefore, magic also needs a connection to energy in order to operate. This is why so many magicians and witches engage in breathwork or pound on drums. dance in circles or light bonfires. All of these activities raise energy that the magic worker can tap into in order to make the magic work. What is this to do with writing novels, designing buildings, painting pictures, making films, or composing songs or dances? To make successful art, art that connects, requires a willingness to make magic. We can all scribble words that we'll never see the outside of a notebook, or scroll drawings that we hide in a closet somewhere. Some of that writing or drawing will even be what I'm calling successful art. It will have raised some energy and connected to something, be it our hearts, souls, or the cosmos. Poet Emily Dickinson is a great example of this. She wrote hundreds of poems, bearing her mind and her soul. Dickinson paid great attention to the world around her and her inner world. Despite her poems not being published in her lifetime, she connected. Dickinson made magic. That is what gives her poetry lasting impact. Others of us scribblers and drawers never connect. We never take the risk necessary to make magic and therefore to make art. We never muster up the energy to break through our protections and to fight to illuminate the truth. Don't think I'm making distinctions between literature and pot boilers here. Don't think I preference high art over low. Sometimes the potboiler strikes at greater human mysteries than a carefully constructed literary novel, which is sometimes stripped and polished of the very magic it's set out to create. Other times, the literary novel hits deep water and pulls us down in, swimming into worlds we may have rather avoided, but need to look at all the same. Some art creates more magic than others. But all art needs to connect on some level, even if just to put pleasing shapes or colors next to each other. Think of what we call corporate art, the art that hangs in the lobbies of high rises or at low end motels. It is designed to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. It is art with no teeth and little magic because it is art that takes no risks other than the risk it took. to create something at all. Now, the risk towards any creation is a risk I won't discount. But I want more from us. I want more from writing, painting, dance, and music. I want more from architecture. I want more from DJs and MCs. I grow weary of lack of vision and poor design. Poor design. lacks connection. Bland art does the same. We are told to write what you know, not because we need to be faithful only to our lived experiences, but because we need to risk the knowledge that expands us. When we risk knowledge of ourselves and of the world, a greater magic happens because we've built a bigger bonfire to dance around. But we all start where we are. We learn. We light a candle first and see what illumination that offers. We blow a tentative breath across a dandelion and see which direction the seeds scatter. The stronger the breath, the further the reach of the seeds. The more deeply we connect with our own hopes, fears, and desires, and the more broadly or pointedly we connect with the cosmos, the stronger our magic. and the more potent our art. We live in times of great upheaval in the midst of the normal every day. People are in pain. People are dying. Land and water are being fractured and poisoned. Greed and inequity run whole countries and ruin many lives. In the midst of all this, how can we keep ourselves safe anymore? We cannot. As artists, it is our job to tell the truth. As artists, It is our job to create beauty. As artists, it is our job to offer what ease, joy, or entertainment we can so that those who are aching can be offered some respite for a while. Sometimes our art must challenge others. Sometimes our art needs to offer people a temporary escape. It is not, however, the artist's job to escape. It is the artist's job to confront, to face this world in all of its glorious gorgeousness and weeping despair. Sometimes what art offers is a glimpse of what it means to be brave. To create art fueled by our magic is to connect with everything we love and fear. If we're going to do this, we should illuminate the tundra with flashes of lightning. We should climb into the deepest caves and scale the tallest hills. We can do all of this by sitting in our homes and plumbing our own souls. But we are better served by also greeting the world each day and night, however, wherever, whenever we can. We should drink in as much as possible and let it fill us until we pour it out again. Sometimes in order to create, we need to first destroy. We need to crumble our illusions. We need to blow up the ivory towers that keep us isolated, boring, and safe. Conscious destruction requires our presence and will just as much as conscious creation does. Conscious destruction carries its own magic. It is the tower of the Tarot struck by divine lightning or the rune hagglage, raining destruction onto crops, even as it waters the fields so new seeds can be planted and grow. In what way are you still not invoking the power to dare? What risks are you avoiding taking? Is it being more yourself, more visible on the stage or on the page? Is it plumbing some old memories or visioning something grander and more wild than seems sensible? Is it paring down to the basics and getting back to your foundations in order to create something truly new from the ground up? We need to assess this over and over every time our work starts to feel rote or stale, and every time the energy flow feels like it needs to shift. Will we dare to listen to ourselves? Will we dare to listen to the world and to our gods? Will we dare to create from a place of connection instead of from a place that feels well within our comfort zone? art breaks and art builds. Whether you are a DJ figuring out what will crack open the dance floor or a writer struggling to be free. I hope the magic here will inspire, embolden, and cause something inside of you to want to riot. Or maybe magic will simply make you want to wake up and create something tomorrow, and the next day, and the day that follows that. So that's the end of the reading. And I'm wondering how that connected for you, no matter what kind of a creative person you are, because we're all creative in some way or another. And we all should, I think, though that's, I know, a nasty word, that should word, but we all should, I think, be trying. to best of our ability to connect with the world around us on a daily basis. Every day I light a candle, I sit, I meditate, I stretch, I pray, I align myself. Every day I face the page, I listen to my characters or the words moving through, or I notice the birds, the trees, the murals on the sides of buildings. I listen to music. I connect and align myself with other people's acts of creativity and the creativity of nature itself, the creativity of the cosmos. How are you doing that? And how does that help your life when you remember to connect to creativity? And what effect does it have on your life when you're not connecting to creativity? Asking us these questions feels important all the time to me, but especially during harsh, difficult times of upheaval, especially when people are being terrorized, climate is changing, the economy is crashing, all the things that are going on are going on around the globe and in our own neighborhoods. The more we connect with each other and with our creativity and with the creative impulse in the cosmos, the better able we are to envision and build a future together. So that's it for me today. Once again, my name is T. Thorn Coyle. You can always find me at thornecoyle.com. Thanks so much for listening, for subscribing to my YouTube channel or to this podcast on your favorite podcast outlet. And thanks again to my Patreon people. I couldn't do this without you. Have a magical creative day.