Here is an excerpt from my new book, Between the Bridge and the Water: Death, Rebirth, and Creative Awakening. In it I explore the compelling parallels between the outpouring of creativity in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Golden Gate Bridge’s infamous reputation as the world’s number one suicide destination. It is my opinion that for our creativity, insight, and innovation to be truly powerful, it is imperative that we acknowledge the darkness, too.
Leaning against the four-foot safety railing, I look down and lose myself in the flux of movement and color. Far from both shorelines and the supporting towers, the surface of the water becomes a singularity, dissolving and reforming in a kaleidoscopic array of primordial geometries—lattices, spirals, tunnels, cobwebs—an infinity of non-shapes, a cornucopia of inter-relatedness. It appears as the animated brew of an alchemist, or the roiling cauldron of an oracle. With the complex dance of waves and currents, winds and wakes, shadow and light I am captivated and disoriented; with each passing moment it become more and more difficult to tell whether I am looking down at the sea or up at a layered, tempestuous sky.
I am reminded of the face of a newborn, the way she moves her tiny features—lips, nose, eyes, eyebrows, forehead—combining them in ways that have nothing to do with recognizable emotions and everything to do with the disencumbered life force coursing through her bud of a body. It culminates indiscriminately, in boundless serenity and powerful cries alike. Joy is inseparable from sadness, knowingness and confusion are still joined at the hip. Certainty and uncertainty are non-states awaiting the capacity to question. These are pre-emotions, fragments of wholeness unraveling toward multiplicity, then reforming, the many moving back again towards the one, the braids of a goddess rewoven, the eyes of a sage drinking in light, the blood of the life force dispersed with each heartbeat, the wind of creation riding lungfuls of air.
If you would like a copy, follow this link, Between the Bridge and the Water: Death, Rebirth, and Creative Awakening. Comments and feedback are always welcome!