The River and Its Banks: On the Art of Creation and Flow
There’s a place every creator knows — that weightless space where time folds, thought dissolves, and something larger begins to move through us. We call it flow, inspiration, communion, consciousness. Whatever name we give it, it is the same ancient current — the one that turns imagination into form, and chaos into beauty.
We talk about the flow state — that peak experience where artists, athletes, dancers, poets, and dreamers lose themselves in the act of creation.
Michael Jordan on the court. Billy Elliot in his dance.
You, me, anyone who’s ever forgotten themselves inside the moment of doing.
In that space, limits dissolve. Doing and being become one.
As Billy Elliot says, “It’s like ’lectricity.”
Something else becomes present in us — a current that soothes the edges of our limitations.
A new form begins to shimmer into being, and we are lighter for it.
There is joy. Participation. Communion.
It feels like a meeting — between what we call the ego, the form-maker,
and what mystics have called God, Spirit, or now simply Consciousness.
An invisible intelligence, a shared awareness,
an elegance threading through all things.
Evolution itself may not be the blind mechanism we once imagined.
Even Darwin suspected a purposefulness,
a trajectory bending toward meaning
Sri Aurobindo, Thomas Merton — mystics across centuries —
speak not of an absence but a presence:
an intelligence that whispers through form,
inviting us to collaborate in its unfolding.
So I search for form.
A structure that can hold what I perceive in my imagination —
a container for the vastness that wants to speak
Without form, imagination is a flood.
With form, it becomes a river.
For me, that form is often a portrait.
A face. Eyes, nose, mouth — the shared agreements of human recognition.
Style, medium, skill — these are my tools, my chosen banks.
Within that boundary, I wander freely.
The imagination roams the open field —
and when I begin to draw, it is as if something taps me on the shoulder.
A nudge, a whisper, not always words —
more often a feeling, a texture,
like the sense of coarse cloth suggesting how a shirt should feel.
I listen.
Dark here. Light there.
And slowly, the formless takes form.
The ego chooses the shape — based on what feels true,
what I’ve learned, what I love.
But what in-forms the form is not me.
It moves through me.
This is why I prefer the word consciousness to unconscious.
It shifts the image from something hidden below
to something vast — all around —
the field of potential made visible.
Physicist Amit Goswami calls it quantum thinking:
two levels of mind —
the conscious mind of actuality
and the unconscious (or quantum) mind of possibility.
This is the creative dance.
This is evolution made personal.
Today, when the world feels uncertain,
when the old music no longer fits the steps we’ve memorized,
we reach for old structures — familiar hooks to hang our hats.
But that won’t work anymore
What we need is not more problem-solving.
We need transcendence.
Transcendence lives in pure potentiality —
the space where creators walk, barefoot and brave,
to bring something new into being.
Creative acts are born of limitation.
A hard-won truth: I have resisted limits all my life.
Yet I’ve learned —
a river without banks is only a flood.
The creation process is not separate from you.
It is not outside you.
It is your body, mind, heart, hands, and soul.
You are the form-maker and the field,
the river and the banks,
the current and the course.
You are it.
You have IT.
IT is…in you.
The Journey 