The Fire of Creativity

A wise woman once said:

"Things don't have to be perfect, they have to happen. »

Tezz 

I always talk about feelings, about the importance of feeling, and yet I realized that I was still trying to intellectualize everything.

One night before the full moon in February 2016, I was running barefoot through the woods of a secret and sacred place located in the mountains, part of the Andes mountain range, in Argentina.

It was the San Pedro Eve ceremony, which I wasn't sure I would participate in yet.

I was running in tears and I don’t remember if I screamed but I deeply wanted to.

It was cold and I was barely dressed.

I was scared and lost.

I was scared because I was lost.

Before that night, I had spent the entire week meditating in silence every morning at Dawn, after being called by five bell rings, five rings for the five elements, which each day pulled me from my nighttime dreams. After each morning meditation, I drew the strangest manifestations that appeared to me even with my eyes closed.

Could these be messages?

Every day I tried to understand their meaning without success.

I spent every day caring for the home I shared with strangers seeking healing.

I found them touching but sometimes I found myself judging them, or at least their actions and reactions without understanding that they were there because they acted like that, they were there because they deeply wanted these patterns to change.

Today, I see through these actions the traumas they carried, I see that they were making the effort to make a change.

It's admirable.

I was blessed to witness this and be a part of this energy.

We all spent the entire week bathing in the purest river I've ever swum in.

Littered with huge pink granite boulders filled with quartz crystals.

The place radiated, vibrated at an immeasurable frequency.

It was a heavenly place.

And every evening we would gather around the fireplace after a musical meditation in which we participated with instruments more surprising than each other and a copious vegetarian dinner prepared by our hosts with tender love disguised in a distant silence.

That night when I ran through that forest towards nowhere, I no longer thought about the bones I had found behind our rustic bathroom where we had to go armed with a candle at night because we lived without electricity.

I was later told that it was one of the donkeys on the property that had been attacked by a puma years earlier.

There was a small family of donkeys that I would sometimes come across at night on my way to the bathroom.

My eyes wide open in the darkest of blackness, my senses were awakened at the highest level.

It was often the sound of hooves hitting the rocky ground that allowed me to locate a possible encounter.

Often I would turn towards the noises, the lit candle sheltered in my other hand, and say, "Ah, Thomas, it's you! You scared me! »

Thomas was the donkey who helped me climb the mountain for over two hours after a journey of nearly 67 hours by plane, train, bus and carpool.

At first he was just supposed to carry the bags, but in the end he was brave enough to also support my weight in the last few minutes of the walk because I was completely exhausted.

That night I was no longer afraid of pumas, I was no longer afraid of the night, I was no longer afraid of not being able to see, I was no longer afraid of the outside.

I was afraid of the « inside »

Of what was inside me..

I can't tell you if I was afraid of my emotions, but I know I was afraid of what my emotions led me to think.

It's clear that I was trying to intellectualize what I was feeling.

My body and being were ready to feel but my mind was not mature enough to understand it.

I was already feeling a lot, but I was thinking even more. Maybe too much.

However, this is what allowed me to be where I am today.

To be free to be who I want to be.

To give me the freedom to do what I want with my life.

Without bowing to the system demands, nor to the standardized stereotypes that it imposes on us, to use the words of Tezz Tran in her book made in collaboration with Stefan Rapo.

The question of whether I was worthy of love did not yet arise…

That night I no longer knew who I was because I think I was beginning to understand that I was not who I thought I was, or rather who I was told I was, who I was accused of being.

And despite this intellectual realization, my body and my being had already understood, as if it were obvious, that my true nature resided in the unconscious aspect of my failed actions.

I didn't want that anymore, I wanted to be conscious, step by step, of everything I would undertake.

The reason I went up that mountain was because I was sick, and I was sick because at that time I suffered a lot of psychological abuse, and it was violent. I almost lost an organ.

I no longer remember the way back to my room, nor how sleep finally came to welcome me.

The next day was one of the best days of my life.

It is difficult for me to find the words to explain this experience without compromising its authenticity, its truth, at least as I experienced it.

But it allowed me to understand something, with an understanding that is no longer intellectualized but which has revealed an indelible imprint on my consciousness and that of those with whom I shared the experience.

I am writing this because we all talked about it together after.

That day I knew that I wanted to sing, to write in order to tell in every possible way, that's what I had discovered that day.

Love. True love. Whole love.

Not just the one we seek through our relationships, through others, but the one who is there, everywhere and present in all living things.

There have been people who have tried to make me ask the question, namely, am I worthy of love?

Others who insisted that I was.

At one point I almost believed that I had to anchor in myself, like a mantra, that I deserve to be loved.

But deep down I wanted to tell them, and I think I even told some of them, that I didn't care about deserving to be loved.

I don’t need this to live.

After spending a long weekend with my friends and artistic partners on the Free Spirit project, I had a revelation.

Who cares.

It's because of this stupid question that we're stuck.

It is because of this kind of question that we no longer dare to do anything.

It is because of this kind of question that I no longer dared to create while I have a thousand things inside me that only want one thing: to come out.

There's a traffic jam inside.

It makes me feel dizzy like I'm going to throw up.

And I'm here and I'm waiting, and I'm wasting time that I don't have.

« Will people understand? Will they like it? »

I think I'm more concerned about the fact that they like my work than that they like me, but if you add it all up, you'll see that the people who like my work are often people who genuinely like me.

You still have the case of artists with big stories behind their backs, and where you need to separate the artist from the man (if you are sane), but I believe that is not my case.

The verdict is in.

I will no longer be afraid to create, I will no longer be afraid of being judged, I will no longer be afraid of making mistakes, I will no longer be afraid of being wrong, I will no longer be afraid of not knowing how to manage my emotions when the feeling of satisfaction turns into a growing excitement that too often pushes me to celebrations that often border on catastrophe to embrace the dramatic.

I want to live!

The important thing is not perfection, the important thing is to make it happen.

I was afraid of the fire within me, the one that allows me to create without knowing that this fire of creativity is none other than Love.

This breakdown was actually just a breakthrough.

Many people look down on psychotropic drugs, but this experience opened my eyes.

It allowed me to seal in my being realizations that some of the people who crossed my path tried to make me forget or at least to make me doubt them.

Because these achievements called into question the meaning they had given to their lives.

Well, not the one they gave themselves, but the one imposed on them by a real lack of choice.

Since the rise of various tools based on artificial intelligence, I have received a lot of encouragement from those around me to integrate it into my work.

I have nothing against artificial intelligence, and although I have also heard various warnings about it, it does not scare me.

The question of reliability arises. The robot would be more reliable.

Why not, but we still need to supervise the tool.

But why can't we trust the reliability of man?

What happened?

It seems that humans are no longer reliable.

And yet reliability is a great virtue.

It requires unwavering dedication and devotion, which arises from the interest and investment, consideration and attention we pay to things, to people, involving emotional intelligence such as the evolutionary pathway: empathy and compassion.

Do you remember who said that empathy and compassion were the problem with this world?

The opposite would be more accurate.

Are we victims of a devolving system?

Will artificial intelligence one day be able to take new evolutionary pathways towards emotional intelligence?

I am not an expert on the subject, but I tell myself that if we are at the origin of its creation, if we created it, it is because somewhere, we can direct it, authorize it or conversely prohibit it, is that not so?

Artificial intelligence is a tool that only works because its algorithms have been programmed.

So we can deduce that, without exception, all information coming from this tool is information that we have given it.

If this information is scary, it is not the tool's fault or decision.

If this information is wrong the reason is the same.

But what about inaccessible information?

What if every government had the power to restrict certain access to certain information when programming the tool?

So leaving us with an incomplete choice of possibilities and perhaps even essential information?

I have a feeling the real control issue here isn't about the tool.

I even have the impression that they are trying to scare us with the tool precisely for the sake of control.

That the misinformation is biased by a desire for control.

That we are being distracted by a control issue.

So that we avoid thinking.

Apparently it's not good.

So that we can no longer make choices.

So that we can no longer “do” what we would like to do and potentially what we should do in order to evolve.

Prevent things from happening.

We are prevented from evolving by control. We cannot evolve because of control.

“Things don’t have to be perfect, they have to happen.”

This has to happen because this is how we evolve.

Just because we want to strive for perfection doesn't mean we can't make mistakes.

We are human, we make mistakes and we learn from them.

Any errors in the tool are our responsibility.

What is important is to do things in love.

I have noticed in particular that, although I am already enormously invested in everything I undertake, only because I cannot imagine giving time to the wind, I am even more invested with people for whom I have affection and admiration, when they are beautiful people, beautiful souls with generous hearts.

I have sometimes found myself giving what I don't have and finding myself in dangerous situations because the exchange was biased by ego.

I refuse to give half measures and for that I need to find people who share this reasoning.

I can be overly indulgent if I have affection for my colleagues, so I have learned to recognize those with bad intentions or simply bad backgrounds.

I don't blame them, despite the abuse and bad experiences, I just hope they change for the better, not just for the world around them but for themselves.

And on the contrary, I tend to distance myself from collaborations made for financial reasons only when I doubt the goodwill of my collaborators.

Music is something special for me because I see in it the possibility, the access to the divine, a real conversation with it that stems from emotional intelligence.

« Beauty will save the world. » said Dostoïevski.

My hero.

But I want to add that it is love that will make it more beautiful.

Love, the starting point, the mystical ingredient that gives life and sublimates all creations.

“They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.» George Orwell, 1984.

Fear can cause us to demonize the subject of our fear.

Hence the existence of taboos.

While it would actually be an invitation to surpass it.

To get out of our comfort zone.

Potentially our “demons” are just obstacles to overcome.

Our demons are only the limits we impose on ourselves.

Some time ago I was afraid of my creativity, I was afraid of what might come out of it, but I was also afraid that it would isolate me from the rest of the world, that I would be considered strange.

I was afraid that the voice/path of my heart would be misunderstood.

I was being made to doubt.

But who exactly was making me doubt?

Doubt this driving feeling which has always helped me to surpass my limits in everything I have undertaken in my life.

I didn't have writer's block; I was just holding myself back from getting things out.

I was afraid of the outcome.

I am no longer afraid because I know that if things are driven by love they will always be received with love.

The One who is above and beyond all conditions.

The One who does no harm.

The sustainability of well-being is no longer found in superficial success, the kind that reassures.

The one who makes you feel the need to hear:

I am beautiful.

I am loved and I deserve to be loved.

I am in control.

They are, today, retrograde and medieval precepts.

“We are missing what makes things real. Because where there is a lack of authenticity, of reality, we find ourselves forced to create our own reality, mostly in our own minds, which is not necessarily part of what can build the foundations of the real world. Of what makes you and others feel alive.”

I am telling you this because too many times I have failed myself and the promise I made to myself on that mountain.

Je vous en parle parce que j’ai l’impression que l’on tente de nous le faire oublier.

« Only love can conquer. 

Because love is real. »

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Happy New Moon under my Sun Sign beautiful Souls & forever thank you for you support <3

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ROCH ARMANDO for PSM in Paris