A 5.5 Year Creative Journey Ends
Liberatus Volume One arrived rolling down the middle of the street on a hand pallet truck. August greenery towered above, creating a jungle-like backdrop.
David, the delivery driver wearing a dark green polo, left the boxes stacked on a pallet in front of the steps to the house.
It was August 16, 2022, and it was the beginning of the end of a creative journey that officially began five and a half years before on February 15, 2017. Liberatus now has supporters in twenty states and local communities of support in Greenville, South Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia.
It was a team project and a team mission to inspire American unity, and we made it here because we had a spirit of endurance. We launched the Refuge theme in the wake of a horrid church split, and continued during a global pandemic, through the hell of seeing George Floyd’s final moments, and we imagined a new way forward after a failed crowdfunding campaign, after the attack on the US Capitol by our fellow Americans. We finally successfully reached a crowdfunding goal and completed the refining work on its 224 pages while I recovered from a brain injury.
How, in the end, did we make it here, and how might one survive a five-and-a-half year creative endeavor? As a practical life habit, endurance means taking risks, giving up what doesn’t contribute to the end goal, and consistency. We made it here by putting in the work; you have to run a marathon to run a marathon. Making it here for me meant working long hours six days a week for a solid two years of the creative cycle. But the desire for risk, sacrifice, and consistency begins in the heart, mind, and spirit.
Sin is “humanity’s endless capacity for self-rejection,” Richard Rohr says Henri Nouwen once told him privately. And it’s easy to see—now that we’ve made it to the end of this creative journey, and our work is out in the world, on your coffee tables and in your conversations with friends—that all of the openly hostile comments along the way were nothing more than self-rejection on the part of the person who delivered them. Internalizing what they said is self-rejection, too.
Creativity is an adventure in endurance that requires us to face our inner dragons, to find ourselves alone on the trail and decide for ourselves what matters and what we will create to better humanity with the power that we have. We can’t live creative lives and self-reject at the same time.
Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
-Henri Nouwen, January 10, 2022 Daily Meditation
Once upon a time, we were created to reflect our Creator, and that’s the adventure we live. The adventure will continue.
The photos on the pages of Liberatus Volume One pictured here were taken by Anastasia Waltschew and Border Perspective. The pages of Volume One pictured here and the South Nixon logo were designed by David Paxton.