Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community

“To have a friend who understands

and appreciates your work,

one who never lets you down

but who becomes more devoted,

more reverent, as the years go by,

that is a rare experience.”

Living Into The Liminal Lucid Spaces

“What sustains the artist is the look of love in the eyes of the beholder.

Not money, not the right connections, not exhibitions, not flattering reviews.”

Henry Miller

#ssy #wholeness #connection #atmavidya

Henry Miller on the Secret to Growth, in Art and in Life

U N S E L F I N G

"Somewhere along the way, in the century of the self, we forgot each other.

We forgot this vast and wonder-filled universe,

of which we are each but a tiny and transient wonder.

We forgot that all creative work —

be it music or mathematics, poetry or physics,

anything we might call art —

is a hand outstretched in the dark, reaching not for visibility

but for the light that lives between us.

Reaching for connection.

We forgot what Whitman knew even as he proclaimed

“I celebrate myself!” — that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

No word appears in Leaves of Grass more times than you.

We are living through a pandemic of selfing

rampant self-celebration that mistakes applause for connection, likes for love.

Social media companies are capitalizing on our native need for affirmation,

exploiting our compromised immunity to manipulation at every turn:

algorithms prioritizing selfies over sunflowers,

algorithms amplifying the word I,

algorithms doping us on the dopamine of being noticed,

seducing us into forgetting the art and joy of noticing

that crowning glory of consciousness.

"Pay Attention Be Astonished Tell About It"

Mary Oliver

And somewhere, in the quiet core of our being,

this frantic hunt for likes is making us like ourselves less.

There must be another way —

a way to unself just enough to remember each other,

to grow a little more awake to this world that shimmers with wonder,

of which any one self is only a fleck.

Whatever that way is, it is not some new technology.

Maybe it is a new ethic. Maybe it is the oldest ethic.

Here is what I propose:

As an experiment, for one continuous month,

make the focus of one in every three things you share on social media —

wherever you normally share,

however regularly or irregularly you do, however many people you reach —

something other than yourself or your own work:

a friend’s art project, a stranger’s poem, a record by a musician you love,

the tree shimmering with majesty and mystery in the low morning light,

someone in your community you admire,

a bygone pioneer of something you value, a book that spun you on your axis,

the lost cat sign crayoned by a neighbor’s child,

the new community garden a few blocks over,

news of the dazzling galaxy discovered by the dazzling new space telescope

a few million lightyears over.

Try it for a month —

try it on like a shirt, see how it feels.

And if you don’t feel that warm glow of generosity,

that good glad feeling of making another’s day,

or simply the relief of a small sabbatical from the tedium of the self,

then you can always go back to the old way.

Wherever you land, it will not have been a wasted month.

"The sunshine of life springs from twin suns. We may call them love and art. We may call them connection and creativity. Both can take many forms. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. Both are instruments of unselfing.

It is often in the cradle of friendship — a word not to be used carelessly — that our creative energies are strengthened and renewed. Through its tendrils, we find community — a place where our own creative work is reflected and refracted through that of others to cast a shimmering radiance of mutual magnification that borders on magic. This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship."