There is no doubt that humor is one of our most disarming capacities. Humor is a medicine for even the most calcified situations—from gallows humor to satire in the face of existential absurdity, to the silliest of silliness with close friends or children.

But there are times when humor may be simply too small for the weight of what we’re facing.

I’ve found myself falling—half willingly, half against my better judgment—down all-too-familiar rabbit holes. Willingly, because some truths need to be known, some realities need to be honored, and my personal beliefs must be balanced by more information, even when that information introduces the inevitable discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Against my better judgment, because some of these holes have decades of familiarity to me, and too many of them are dark. Dark in their cruelty and in their occult malevolence. Dark in ways that sometimes demand a radical re‑understanding of the world. Some give me nightmares and leave me feeling powerless, angry, fearful—especially for my loved ones.

Some may know how deep the rabbit holes go, but even when we remain on the surface, in the mundane world of human behavior, life is hard enough to grapple with. There are moments when the world seems to fall apart: when systems collapse, when the stories we’ve been told unravel, when the air is thick with dissent, and even the weather feels increasingly brutal. Succumbing—becoming numb to it all, small to it all, blind to it all, furious at it all, terrified by it all—is a very human reaction.

The truth is that the world is hard, and always has been.

In the Pali Canon, the word dukkha is often translated into English as “suffering,” but also conveys “unsatisfactoriness,” “instability.” When the sh*t hits the fan, we are living in dukkha made tangible. The illusion of control is shattered. The reality is raw and unfiltered.

While it is true that we live in a time of rapid change, amplified anxieties, and relentless information, it is also true that human life has always contained fracture, loss, and uncertainty. The iterations may differ—technology, politics, culture, and so on, but the existential conditions remain: we are finite, vulnerable, and subject to forces beyond our control.

Recognizing this matters because it removes the illusion that crisis is an anomaly. When we accept that difficulty is part of the human condition, we can stop treating our responses as failures and start treating them as practices to be cultivated. The Buddha never promised comfort. He offered awakening. And awakening, as many of us have discovered, is rarely gentle; it breaks open the world we thought we knew.

Whatever framing we use—scientific, spiritual, or mythic—the experience of awakening has a destabilizing effect. What is awakening, anyway? Opening our eyes to truth? Becoming aware of the layers of reality? That we may be a hologram within the matrix of the quantum field? Or that we may be nothing but mechanistic beings, adrift in a nihilistic, entropic universe? Maybe life is like a platform game of ascension, or perhaps time is such an illusion that this life—even every incarnation—are manifesting in the same moment. Are we the biological result of something other than hominid evolution? Are we multidimensional energetic entities with the subtle capacity to commune with others beyond our biological veil of perception? Do we inhabit a reality in which, if there is an ultimate good, there is also its ultimate opposite? If we look to a godhead—whatever our religion—there is likely to be its dark mirror, which may come with its own ritualistic practices.

We don’t need to be living in the depths of any of these rabbit holes for life to feel as though it’s falling apart. Yet, in the Zen tradition, we are taught that even the most fetid muck can nourish the flowering lotus. Collapse, then, is not the end; it is compost—it is the raw material of transformation.

But composting is not glamorous. It is slow, messy, and often invisible. It requires faith in unseen processes. It requires us to stay with the rot long enough for it to become fertile. It requires trust in liminality and that the liminal mind is not a fixed identity. It is a mode of perception, a way of being that thrives in thresholds—those spaces between what was and what is not yet. It is consciousness that arises when old forms collapse but new ones have not yet arrived. It is the mind of the artist, the mystic, the meditator, the migrant, the one who walks between worlds.

I’ve come to understand the liminal mind as a necessary evolutionary response to a world in flux. It is not escapist. It is not passive. It is radically present to the ambiguity of now. It listens where others shout. It waits where others rush. And it creates not to distract but to reveal.

When the world is unraveling—politically, ecologically, spiritually—it is the liminal mind that knows what to do.

It makes art.

This is not about being an artist in the professional sense. This is about reclaiming your birthright as a creator, a meaning-weaver, a myth-maker. This is about remembering that creativity is not a luxury but a lifeline, and we become the mirror, the medicine, the midwife of a world not yet born. Creativity is a fundamental human capacity, woven into how we solve problems, tell stories, and make sense of our lives.

When I say “make art,” I mean any small, deliberate act of creation: drawing a line, arranging a bowl of fruit, writing a sentence, or shaping clay with your hands. These acts are not merely judged by their aesthetic outcome as their value lies in the way they reorient attention. Making requires focused perception, a narrowing of the mind’s scatter into a single thread. That narrowing is the essence of many meditative traditions: a return to the present moment through disciplined attention.

Art-making engages the body and senses in ways that sitting meditation sometimes does not; the sensory act pulls the nervous system out of rumination and into embodied presence. In my experience, this embodied attention is a practical tool for emotional regulation. It calms the sympathetic nervous system, creates a safe container for feeling, and allows insight to arise without coercion.

As a natural result, it has a real effect on well-being. Creating gives us a sense of agency when other systems feel uncontrollable. It provides a micro-economy of cause and effect: I make a mark, the mark exists, I can change it. That loop of intention, action, and result rebuilds confidence and reduces helplessness. It cultivates curiosity, which is the antidote to despair. When you are curious about a line, a color, or a texture, you are less likely to be trapped by catastrophic thinking.

Art-making is not a cure-all, but it is a reliable companion that reduces anxiety by anchoring attention. It increases resilience by creating a sense of efficacy, and it fosters meaning by allowing us to witness and reframe experience. Over time, a regular practice of making rewires habitual responses: instead of spiraling into panic, we learn to return to the creative urge—itself a form of training the mind.

We’re not prettifying the pain when we make art, we’re metabolizing it. We are transforming the unbearable into the beautiful by giving it form.

The Buddhist teachings offer a clear framework for why making matters. The First Noble Truth identifies suffering as an intrinsic feature of conditioned life, and mindfulness practice trains attention to rest in present experience without aversion or clinging. Art can be an upaya: an embodied, creative practice, offering an alternate route to the same capacities of attention, clarity, and compassion.

Humans are creative by nature. From the earliest cave paintings to the simplest doodle, humans have used marks and objects to externalize inner states, and that externalization matters. When we put feeling into form, we can look at it, name it, and respond to it. The act of making translates the messy, often wordless interior into something legible. 

To make art when the world is burning is not escapism; it is resistance. And art, when made from this place, becomes a form of Dharma transmission. It says: I see and I refuse to look away. And I offer this as a mirror even if not an ultimate solution. It is also remembrance and a radical act of saying: I am still here. I still feel. I still see beauty. I still believe in the sacred. 

To live in this world is to be, in some sense, gaslit. We are told we are separate. That the Earth is inert. That worth is measured in productivity. That grief is weakness. That beauty is frivolous. These are not just cultural messages, so much as spells. The work of the artist, the contemplative, the liminal mind, then, is to break the spell. To see through the illusion. To remember what we already know in our bones: that we are not separate. That the Earth is alive. That beauty is medicine. That grief is holy. Art becomes a counter-spell. A way of re-enchanting the world with truth. With presence. With the sacredness of the ordinary.

The dichotomy of human existence is a long lineage of eras in which brutality and expanded awareness have coexisted. It may simply be that in the depths of despair humans look for more. The Golden Age of Prague was a time of extraordinary cultural flowering set against the turbulence of medieval Europe. China’s Warring States era birthed its greatest philosophies. India’s Upanishadic and Buddhist revolutions were forged in political and social upheaval. The Abbasid Golden Age was radiant amid imperial fracture and systemic slavery. The Renaissance arose amid plague and collapse. Again and again, the lotus blooms.

When people make together, the act of creating becomes a shared ritual. Rituals are powerful because they mark transitions and create collective memory. In times of crisis, shared making reminds us that we are not alone in our vulnerability and that we can co-create forms of care.

To make art in a time of collapse is to walk the Bodhisattva Path. It is to stay awake when sleep would be easier. It is to offer your voice, your vision, your vulnerability for connection. For healing. For truth. It is a way of meeting reality with attention and care. It is a practice that acknowledges pain while refusing to be consumed by it.

If you are reading this and feeling the weight of the world, try this, alone or in company: 

Collect anything you need—perhaps paper and pencil, but you may opt to be outside with fingers in the soil—and set a timer for five minutes. Settle your body, take three slow deep belly breaths, then make one mark and notice what changes. You may not solve the problem, but you will have created a small island of clarity. Over time, those islands can accumulate into a landscape in which you can live. Maybe add to the mark of the preceding meditation and see how it evolves. Art, in this context, is not decoration, it is alchemy. It is the act of taking the unbearable and giving it form: a poem; a painting; a garden; a meal; a gesture of care; a response to crisis. They are how we metabolize grief, rage, confusion, and find clarity in the liminal. They are how we externalize the invisible and add beauty to the world. They are how we stay human.

Related features from BDG

The Liminal Year: Compassion at the Tipping Point
“Probably Lesbians Will Get Enlightened First”
A Buddhist Response to Global Unrest

More from Silk Alchemy by Nachaya Campbell-Allen