An invitation to creativity

I read a wonderful passage in Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening this morning:

"The mind's tendency to grasp onto solid forms is like a bird in flight always looking for the next branch to land on.  And this narrow focus prevents us from appreciating what it is like to sail through space, to experience what one Hasidic master called the 'between stage' -- a primal state of potentiality that gives birth to new possibilities."

That soaring emptiness between the concepts, concerns and constructions of the mind, he says, is the source of all creativity, and I think I know what he means: when I am in that space, I get, not just the freedom and the feel of air under my wings, but also the coolness of the forest, the clearness of a bird's song, and the rush of a waterfall.

And even though he's describing that as the space between landing on the branches, there's a part of me that lives, not for the branches, but for the tiny moments between thoughts and obsessions, the moments of pure clarity... Which I think is what yesterday's poem was addressing, in Coleman Barks' book, A Year with Rumi:

Some song or something

Birdsong brings relief

to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say.

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me

I'm thinking this poem should be subtitled "The Artist's/Musician's/Poet's Lament."