Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 50

 

In the most recent episode of ‘Exploring your Creative Genius’ our exploration offered creative thoughts and ideas about boundaries and thresholds, about phases, about one state becoming another and being betwixt and between…about exploration.

The word Liminal is applied to these dynamics.

Liminal spaces are the places of transition. The gap. It can be physical, like a doorway. It can be emotional, like a divorce, or metaphorical, like a decision.

It can be short lived, like stepping through a doorway, or it can be extended where we are living in between for a period of time.

A foyer, in architecture, is a great picture of a Liminal place. You’ve stepped out of the outside world and find yourself in a staging area, a place to collect yourself before your continue into the house or building.

Liminal comes from the Latin “limen,” meaning threshold.

The journey a Monarch caterpillar takes on its way to becoming a butterfly is a great display of the creative dynamics associated with Liminal space. I find the journey analogous to the one our nation is taking.

The Monarch caterpillar phase lasts about two weeks and during that time it is very good at moving straight ahead and devouring everything in its path; that’s been our nation’s behavior pretty much all our history, yeah?

Then within its chrysalis phase, around 5 to 15 days, the caterpillar consumes itself until it is a gooey undifferentiated ooze. And to continue the analogy to our nation’s progress, it seems to me that for some time now we have been living in such chaotic uncertain times, it approaches that ooze.

And it’s interesting that the chrysalis is attached to the old structure as our analogy plays out.

Within that gooey ooze there are a few individual cells that do maintain structural integrity and slowly at first, then more rapidly, they begin to form clusters with other cells—the ooze seems to resist this process—and as they  begin to cluster they start resonating at the same frequency, passing information back and forth until they hit a tipping point. They begin acting not as discrete individual cells but as a multi-cell organism – and a butterfly is born.

I love that the scientist who beheld this process called these cells Imaginal Cells. The instant I read that I declared me and my work would be Imaginal Cells.

A final step: the Monarch butterfly has to struggle to leave it’s chrysalis and that struggle is vital, for it sets in motion the process of shaping its wings, filling them with blood.

Now the outcome isn’t certain; sometimes the ooze wins and stops the process all together or damages it enough that the butterfly’s proboscis sometimes doesn’t form.

Three creative behaviors will serve us particularly well in Liminal space:

  • A Bias for Action. You get smarter faster about what is happening, and how you can influence it, by getting started, by engaging, by experiencing.
  • Multiple Creative PerspectiveS. The more views you can take, the more experiences you can participate in, the more likely you will be able to develop a working understanding of what is happening.
  • The Power of Both. When you find contradiction, and you will, instead of letting that stump you and before you jump to compromise, try to restate the question that you are answering or the opportunity you are developing so that Both can be true.

I urge you to see yourself as an Imaginal Cell. Search for others. Work together. Let’s shape our country into a creative joy.

“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!

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