The Art of Re-Creation
The rhythm of the creative soul demands that leisure—not productivity—is the secret to creative mastery
This piece originally appeared on my personal Substack, Clinsights, here. It has been edited and improved for publication in The FASO Way.
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The Art of Re-Creation
by Clint Watson, FASO Founder
The following piece is an excerpt from my forthcoming book The Sovereign Artist.
Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination
Terence McKenna
During a dark time when I experienced burnout, I lost my creative drive and my world went grey. I taught myself, intuitively, how to climb out of that hole and, through a slow process learned through trial-and-error, I was able to reopen my connection to my heart and soul again. My world slowly expanded and, as the veil began to lift, reality became more colorful and beautiful than I ever imaged it could be. That experience eventually led me to write The Sovereign Artist.
If one only creates, but does not re-create, the creative well will eventually run dry. You cannot constantly output. You must allow time for input. You must allow time for reflection. You must allow time for solitude. You must allow time for stillness. You must allow time for leisure.
Burnout sneaks up on you. It can be insidious because creative output is intoxicating and you will feel like you are on top of the world right up until the moment you crash. That’s what happened to me. There were, of course, subtle signs that the darkness was approaching. But, in the heat of productivity, such signs are easy to ignore.
It is the soul’s nature to give. If you ignore its needs and continually demand more creativity from it, it will give and give until it can give no more. You cannot continually take from your soul, that’s not how the soul-economy works. You must give back to your soul. You must feed it.
Learning how to re-create yourself is learning how to listen to the needs of your soul. You feed your body instinctively and you must learn to feed your soul intuitively. You must learn to recognize soul-hunger. And the things that feed your soul do not usually overlap with the way we live our modern lives, so you must feed your soul intentionally.
The burnout I experienced is a danger every artist faces and, I now know that I fell into the darkness because I had not yet learned an important lesson that all true masters must eventually learn: before you exhale, you must inhale.
There is a rhythm to nature and your soul is part of nature. You must learn to honor the natural rhythm of being a creative human being. There is a time for work. There is a time for leisure. There is a time for solitude. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak.1
Learning how to honor this rhythm is a major part of the creative path, and it is an important lesson in learning how to awaken. Modernity doesn’t teach this lesson. We worship productivity – the output phase, but we shortchange the leisure – the input phase. This is to our detriment and it is a foolish position.
All of our modern conveniences and our cult of productivity should provide us with more leisure. We live in a world that should provide more human flourishing than any era of the past. We each could live better than nobility of just a few hundred years ago. But, instead, we turned productivity into our god. We joined the cult of busyness. We decided to run faster and faster. We decided to ignore the needs of our souls. And we drown the resulting existential angst under a sea of drugs and distraction.
Modern culture has adopted the desperate creed of Boxer, the loyal workhorse in Animal Farm, who repeated his mantra until the very end: “I will work harder!”
Boxer worked himself to death, loyally serving the pigs who sold his body to a glue boiler to buy themselves whiskey.
Nietzsche foresaw our current dilemma when he said:
We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
However, if we were wise, we would stop this “flight from ourselves” and, instead, we’d turn around and face ourselves. We’d face our angels and our demons. To do this, we must stop succumbing to the mental violence of perpetual activity and turn toward leisure.
If we were wise, we’d be actively expanding our leisure time. Both Plato and Aristotle considered leisure to be the highest good and a prerequisite for the achievement of the highest form of human flourishing, eudaemonia. What the wise ancient Greeks called eudaemonia overlaps with what we have been calling awakening.
What, then, is leisure? It is not “relaxation.” It is not “self-improvement.” It is not “vacation.” Spending your time binging Netflix is not leisure, it is distraction. It is the avoidance of leisure.
The Ancient Greeks used the word scholē (σχολή) for leisure, from which we derive the English word school. For them, leisure was a time for learning, for education. The Latin word for leisure originates from licēre, meaning “to be permitted” or “to be allowed,” reflecting the concept of having the freedom to do something. When we engage in leisure, it is a time for us to learn something and to do something. To learn and do what?
Leisure is the act of learning, from your soul, who you truly are and then doing what your soul truly needs. The learning is your soul’s gift to you. The doing is your gift back to your soul; it is the feeding; the giving back. Leisure is a time to re-create your Self; to liberate yourself. If afterwards, you understand who you truly are a bit better, it was leisure. If you don’t, it was something else.
For Aristotle, leisure consisted of activities such as contemplation, philosophical conversation, listening to music, cultivation of virtue, artistic pursuits, and related soul-inspiring activities.
Nietzsche, too, understood the importance of leisure, writing, “Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity…in this regard they are lazy…The active [men] roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.”
When the nobility of yesteryear engaged in leisure, they didn’t doom-scroll on their phones. They practiced the liberal arts which, in modern terminology, are better called the liberating arts. The liberating arts are the activities which will liberate your true Self. These are the activities that allow you to see through your programming and find the Truth within. They are the very activities Aristotle considered to be scholē — leisure. The liberating arts are the methods by which we awaken. You can see why Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche considered leisure to be mandatory to those who wish to be born again into the full power and purpose of their humanity. The true artist must become such a person.
Real freedom requires the freedom to say “no” to the constant tyranny of the task list; freedom to say “no” to busyness and “yes” to meaning. Being hard to reach is a feature, not a bug. You must have time to be silent; to ponder; to be unavailable.
If practice is honing your ability to play the instrument of your soul, then leisure is the spiritual maintenance of the instrument. Just as a muscle grows during recovery rather than during the lift itself, artistic mastery deepens during periods of renewal. You are the instrument. Practice stresses you. Leisure restores and refines you. Creation is the period when your soul flies. Re-creation is the period when your soul grows.
Therefore, the final thing we must each learn, to become a master, is the art of renewal; the art of re-creating ourself; the art of leisure.
Julia Cameron, in her seminal book, The Artist’s Way, presents her liberating path for the creative person. She proposes only two activities that are non-negotiable: The weekly artist date and the morning pages. These two activities honor the circadian rhythms of our soul. The weekly artist date provides scheduled recurring time for leisure; for input; for solitude; for contemplation. And the morning pages provide daily time for output, for creation of a sort.
Actually, the morning pages can serve as both input and output functions and are uniquely valuable. They serve as a time of reflection and contemplation and yet, often, the soul produces insights during such journaling that, especially for writers, eventually work their way into finished pieces. By balancing creative input and output, we can deepen our connection to our soul’s needs and avoid burnout.
True masters understand that the creative life is a rhythm. It is not all output. Inhalation precedes exhalation. In fact, this is the universal rhythm. Yin and Yang. Contraction and expansion. Going within, and sharing without. All work and no play makes Jack an empty burned out boy.
If you do burn out, there are many things you can do, not only to discover your true Self, your essence, but also to reconnect with your Muse.
If you are looking for ideas on how to do this; how to engage in leisure, I have provided a comprehensive resource of ideas for renewing your soul — re-creating yourself — in Appendix I: Methods of Re-Creation. The methods I outline in Appendix I are the methods I taught myself that I mentioned at the opening of this chapter. They are the methods I intuitively discovered and utilized during my own dark night of the soul.
While the comprehensive list appears in the appendix, I’d like to briefly mention two of the most important needs of your soul: solitude and nature…
To be continued in my next post.
PS - This is one of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If interested, you can join the waitlist here.
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Ecclesiastes 3:7
I take summers off from painting to pursue outdoor activities. When I return to my art in the fall I feel rejuvenated and ready to go.
Such a great reflection. I’ll have to keep coming back to this one. Thank you.👌❤️💐