Unleash you Beast

​So, as you know, I’m big into helping people make their dreams come true. It is this atavistic urge, rising in me, emerging from my gut like Sigourney Weaver’s babies in, “Aliens.” It wants to be bigger than the body that holds it. It stretches which contains it. When I unleash it, it howls in rage and joy, changing everything in its path. It is a beast that will not be denied. It’s ravenous and relentless and it will not stop until I create. Until I am finally of service.
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Unless there’s a new series on Netflix.

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Then, depending on my level of motivation, on my level of courage and determination, my beautiful beast, bent on nothing but creation and service is pushed back down into the numbing cauldron of comfort and forced to slumber for another day.

And there have been a lot of days like that lately. This fall, the mastermind on which I’d been working all summer fell through. Not enough people. Not any people, actually if I’m telling the truth and I don’t want to, but this isn’t a blog for keeping up appearances. So, not one single person signed up this fall.

It hurt. My creative beast’s heart was broken, and the wound left behind was raw and needing love. Or at least, it would have if I’d if I’d given it a chance. Instead, I immediately turned my attention on other things. Important things, yes. Job things. Job-searching things. Adult things. Reasonable, life-skill maintaining things. Things that few people would argue needed attention. So, I put the beast in the cauldron, screwed a lid on it and promised to face them once I had time. Part of me was cut open and I used popcorn, consignment clothes shopping and the Marvel X-Men series, “The Gifted.” as antiseptic until I had the capacity to deal with it.

The antiseptic numbed the pain. It also paralyzed the beast. Instead of feeling, I was reading. Instead of sharing, I was chatting and instead of creating, I was shopping. But it didn’t stop the beast, not totally. I could hear them whimpering softly from their cauldron, begging to be let out. It was easy to ignore at first, pile enough new sweaters on top of the pot and their cries were muffled. I justified it to myself, I had those adulting things of which I needed to take care. I felt that in order to keep both the beast, myself and my cats in house and home, other subjects were more pressing. So, to drown out the beast’s cries, I turned up the music and my attention to the business of living.

Well, the job things are settled for now, happily so, I might add. Now, the life-force burning underneath the cauldron in which I stuffed beast has roared back to life. And the beast has busted out. They and their broken heart are demanding to be heard.
So, here I am the Friday after Thanksgiving, having had all the naps and turkey and Netflix I can tolerate, finally doing what my beast demands that I do: create in the hope of being of service. Demanding that I face the pain I so neatly silenced by the books about modern-day goddesses and bejeweled sweaters and live with the profound discomfort of knowing what I want to do but not quite knowing how to do it. Here I begin: gently cleansing the wounds left by my failure with my tears and patiently making lists of ways I can create again once more.

I’m uncomfortable. I’m tearful. I’m frightened that I won’t ever find a way to get from the “here,” where I write this blog and the “there,” where I’m living my dreams. But I’m facing my beast and my beast is holding out their hand, ready to lead the way on this unmarked path.

What is the beast of creation urging you to do?