Fertility

Creative darkness.
The good stuff.
I'm not talking about the desert, where creativity dries up and leaves it's devotees wandering in dry, bleak territory of non-productive and non-inspiring drivel and hopeless, vast emptiness or minutia.
I am talking about the warm, moist darkness of gestation, creation, fermentation. That dark, secret space inside the psyche where the spark of inspiration and creativity is born.
This place cannot be reached with a vessel, plotted on a map, or dipped into on a timer. If you are a creative, this place must envelope you. It must consume you. It is the opposite of the desert, yet it is often the way out of it.
The darkness can feel like the emptiness before creativity strikes. And it lasts as long as it lasts. Everytime you look at your watch, or try to predict the out come, or speculate your grand plans aloud to an audience it has to reset. The process must begin again to be successful.
This darkness is s blanket fort of safety and rest for an artist. It is a place we go alone, broken, tired, and empty at times. Although once we accept it, and trust it we may soon begin to run gleefully, and passionately towards it's mysterious embrace. This darkness is the liminal state between waking and sleeping. The elusive twilight of genius that fades as soon as you shine a light upon it. This darkness is where all art and beauty is concieved. But this darkness is also what keeps us from being artists. Or stops a brilliant, prolific artist in their tracks.
This darkness is what can cause a timid artist to walk away from creative life. Walk, run, or melt. We turn away to bow down before life's little "obligations", the needs of others or their judgments, or our own fears. We try to share or explains this beautiful, limitless darkness and our friends think we are Satanists or something. We try to take someone with us and the headlights of their scrutiny cause it to receed or even unfriend us. We can fall into years, or even decades of non-creative, sad, lifeless normalcy, where the matches of true originality are too wet for anyone to even know what they are supposed to have been.
We cannot allow this. We simply have to respect and honor this magic genie lamp of genius and creatively at all costs, this nap fort from which all things sprout. We must protect our selves and our seedlings in the cradle of dark, moist earth from time to time. -Without constantly uncovering them -or ourselves- to show off, explain, or justify our lack of interest or participation in other people's expectations of social reality. All magic comes with a price. This is the price of creativity.
How do you self care and set boundaries with others to  honor and respect your creative darkness?