I was on the phone with my friend Sandra, not too long ago. She’s a music therapist and counsellor and she was talking about strategies she uses to help her clients and friends. (You can’t see, but I’m pointing at myself.)
There are many layers of bullshit that people have to work through to solve problems and uncover their authentic selves. And sometimes Sandra will hold her clients hand through the process and sometimes she’ll use tough love. “Because the shit has to be broken through to HAVE a breakthrough.”
Her comment left visions of sledgehammers running through my mind. And it’s true; use the analogy of peeling an onion or breaking a wall. The layers lead to layers leading to more underlying layers. And that leads you to the really deep shit. The stuff that’s been there so long, it’s become guano.
Guano is the excrement left by sea birds and bats on the walls and floors of caves. People use mining equipment to retrieve it. Why? Because its excellent fertilizer. And our own personal guano fertilizes our “raison d’être”. If you read books on mindset, they’re trying to help scrape away and change that guano. In the book “Start With Why”, this guano has led to the building of Fortune 500 companies. These innovators wanted to make a change that their guano told them, needed to be made. This desire to ‘fix’ something, sent them on their business’ path.
But here’s the tricky part, this layer, this guano is so tied up with our emotions, it has no language to explain itself. It will show up in our dreams, our nightmares or be the monster under the bed.
Artists will slip it into their work through choices they make. As authors, we mine this guano to write our stories and try to make sense of the world. And we need to write this guano into our characters’ lives to make them into well-rounded people.
By the time you’re able to name it as a feeling, its just regular shit – revealing the next layer. Curse it but also cherish it. It can be as valuable as gold. It makes art grow.