Shipping Sacred Poop To The Void

You take up a new creative practice.

It could be writing, painting, web design, pottery, knitting, or a hundred other things.

You do it every day and you share your work on the internet.

You would obviously expect crickets for the first few days.

You don't expect crickets for the first few weeks.

A few weeks in you start wondering, is something wrong?

Am I doing this wrong?

Is this a pointless waste of my time?

You're in the desert.

The first 40 days of creativity you're in the desert.

You're making stuff, shipping stuff, only to realize that it's all being shipped to the void.

Your creations are on a one-way rocket ship to a black hole far far away that no one will ever find.

And that's okay, because this isn't the time to worry about being noticed.

The first 40 days in the desert are all about not being led into temptation.

Resistance will tempt us with a dozen different reasons each day why we should skip today's session, today's practice, today's painting, today's writing.

And I say it's the first 40 days, but actually, a lot of people could, through sheer willpower, force their way through 40 days but then still come out the other side and give up.

So let's be more realistic, more conservative, and say that you will be in the desert, shipping creation after creation to the void, facing the deliciously enticing temptation to quit, for at least 80 days.

That's 80 sacrifices in a row that you will make to the Gods of Creativity, to the Muse, to Inspiration, before you arrive at an oasis and find life, people, and nourishment.

Expect nothing from those first 80 things that you made.

It's entirely possible, after spending 1 to 2 hours per day making the thing and putting it out there, and then doing that again for 80 days in a row, that nobody will notice you've been making anything.

That's the best thing we could hope for!

The first 80 things we make are gonna be poop.

Sacred poop, that we make as best we can, but sacred poop is still poop.

And I believe the fewer people that see our poop, the better.

These first 80 creative works are less about the things we make and more about what the process of showing up every day and engaging our creativity makes of us.

We show up, every day, we're dedicated, our subconscious mind sees us behaving differently, God sees us behaving differently, we're being different as we consistently and dedicatedly squeeze our hearts between our hands and spill our creative guts across yet another blank page or canvas, day after day.

In the desert, we can't worry about how good the thing we make is or if others will like it or if we can make money off of it and build a business.

If we are trying to get something out of our creativity, forcing some sort of an outcome before we've paid our dues and proven our worth, then we risk becoming a shill, a sellout.

When we give ourselves to our craft, not knowing what the outcome will be, sacrificing our time and our energy with no expectation, squeezing our concentrated life force out through our pen or brush or keyboard, then the Muse's ears perk up and she is drawn to us.

She knows we came to give, and when we give and give and give, then we get better at giving, we grow closer to Inspiration, we undergo a transformation from the inside out, and 80 sacrificial offerings later, we can hardly remember what it feels like to chose comfort over creativity or let ourselves play hooky for the day.

We can't play hooky, we're professionals.

We're on the hook.

The Muse's hook.

She's got us and we know she has us.

At least, that's the knowingness we approach as we show up each and ever day to make the best sacred poop we can make that day and share it with the world to see.

Or not see.

Remember, hearing crickets is the best case scenario in our first 80 days.

The worst case scenario is we go viral and get a ton of attention on our earliest, most unrefined, roughest, most smelly works of poop.

Yeah, we make from the heart and give our best and yada yada yada but it still absolutely stinks.

It stinks less the more we make, and we start being decent once we make it to the oasis, but we gotta resist temptation for 80 days in the desert first.

I thank you for not being here to see this.

I thank the Void for the obscurity and anonymity that it provides my poop this day.

I'll be back tomorrow with some slightly less stinky poop!

Poop.