It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable. Many writers have contemplated the mystery of creativity — take, for instance, David Bowie, Octavia Butler, John Lennon, May Sarton, Lewis Hyde, and Nick Cave — but none more articulately than the poet, anthropologist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who in his long life published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, influenced two generations of writers and activists, and inspired the main character in the most famous novel by Jack Kerouac (with whom he roomed for a while).Gary Snyder in Allen Ginsberg’s kitchen, 1991. (Photograph: Allen Ginsberg.)In a passage from Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of journal entries and poem fragments from his twenties and thirties — Snyder writes:Poems that spring out fully armed; and those that are the result of artisan care. The contrived poem, workmanship; a sense of achievement and pride of craft; but the pure inspiration flow leaves one with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of “I did it” — only the Muse. That level of mind — the cool water — not intellect and not — (as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconscious. This is just the clear spring — it reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent. Hitting on it, one could try to trace it to the source; but that writes no poems and is in a sense ingratitude. Or one can see where it goes: to all things and in all things. The hidden water underground. Anyhow — one shouts for the moon in always insisting on it; and safer-minded poets settle for any muddy flow and refine it as best they can.In another entry, he considers the fork in the channel an artist must face — to go toward tradition or toward the unexampled, toward order or toward chaos:Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing.Art by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)But as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):HOW POETRY COMES TO MEIt comes blundering over theBoulders at night, it staysFrightened outside theRange of my campfireI go to meet it at theEdge of the lightComplement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.