Have you heard of William Burroughs?  William Burroughs was one of the Beats, that group of eccentric and creative people, people who included Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl, and Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, whose openended view of life laid the cultural groundwork for the emergence of the American hippie movement in the Sixties.  Intelligent and well read, Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, outlived all of his contemporaries and in his later years became a mentor to many a wanderer in the Sixties.
     Like all of us, Burroughs had his faults and shortcomings, but a recent biographer, Barry Miles, points out that perhaps his greatest struggle was with what Miles calls the "ugly spirit."  Like many a highly creative person, Burroughs wrestled with inner demons.  Yet it was out of these battles that came his best work.
     How ironic that the most creative individuals are often the most tortured people.  On the other hand, it makes wonderful sense.  If creativity were easy, we would all be Beethovens.  We would all be Burroughses.  We would all be Steve Jobses.  No, creativity must be difficult.  It must be demanding, it must be challenging.  It must be the fruit of a long journey.  What is important rarely comes on the first try.
     Bigger picture, however, we find creativity to be difficult because we are fractured beings living in a fractured world.  To find what is real, we must give up illusion.  We must give up what we think.  We must embrace the unknown.  For it is in the unknown that we find what we most need to know.  We step into the mystery, step into the mist.  We tread in the foundations, walk through the beginnings.  We dig into the point of it all, that creativity comes finally from the fact of a created cosmos, the personal and present metaphysical upon which all depends.