Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, “So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?”

Several threats emerge each day. They can spoil verse, prose, and equipoise. Several opportunities emerge each day. They can be as disruptive.

Creation is complicated whether we create with words or hands or otherwise. Whatever else is involved, the mind is our principal creative tool.

The surgeon and the pilot were, as far as I can tell, not being creative They were being procedural, instrumental, managing rather than creating.  For them fear emerges suddenly, unexpectedly and is always something to suppress.

For the creator fear is a constant companion, because failure is more likely than success. The new perception, conception, construction-of-reality - progeny of a promiscuous imagination - is unlikely to survive the day.  We know this in the morning as we begin.  There are evenings we give thanks for what has not survived, for we have seen it was not good.

In each failed creation we experience our own mortality, we anticipate our own demise, we see our own final failure. Knowing this is more likely than not, each morning we awake and take up fear with our coffee, our hammer or broom or brush, our keys or keyboard, our welding torch and flux, whatever the tools of our creative craft: fear is part of the mix.