The Creative Path
The next Three Sundays Series begins May 10th
If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise
— William Blake
Three Sundays in May with Special Guest, Rick Rubin
The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.
We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.
Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once you take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feels so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.
Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos. Resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.
To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.
Bringing our inner and outer worlds together is the theme of these three Sundays in May. Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.
In the third Sunday of the series, David will be joined by Rick Rubin, producer and interpretive maestro for so many famous musicians of all genres, but also the best selling author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick has interviewed David in many of his own Tetragrammaton podcasts and is now willing to take some of his own good medicine on the Three Sundays Series.
Live virtual sessions for The Creative Path: Carrying What is Hidden as a Gift to Others will take place on May 10th, 17th and 24th. Session recordings and resources will be made available for all registered attendees until October 1st, 2026.
Paid Substack subscribers receive $35 off the cost of registration. If you are a paid Substack subscriber, and have not received a discount code in email for the May 2026 Series, contact support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.
Note: If you have not registered for a Three Sundays Series on davidwhyte.com website, you will need to create a username and password in order to register and access the series resource materials.
With anticipation,
and all of us at Many Rivers
