Years ago I took a workshop from William Kittredge who taught creative writing at the University of Montana for thirty years. He said when he first started out teaching he was concerned with providing his students with information and techniques for writing. As time progressed he found that the most important thing he could do for his students was to help them answer the question of why they wanted to write.

I often use this assignment with my students: Do a ten minute freewrite starting with the prompt Why I write. . . Try it, let your mind run, this can help you tap the energy behind the desire to write.

Earlier I explained you could start with the word kumquats and if you let it, the writing would take you where it really wants to go. Below is a poem of mine that came from starting with the word raspberries and having no idea what I was going to write. This is the final draft of a poem that ended up being about my father.

Raspberries

Sweetness tinged tart, rising
from root stock my father planted
in the fog haunted garden,

hands plunged into black earth
gritty beneath fingernails, on his knees
seeking the salvation nurturing
seeds can bring a burdened soul.

Vines dripped red berries
sprinkled on vanilla ice cream
in the dark kitchen, on the long nights
when dreams would not let him sleep.

The War in the Pacific, an ambush
in a Philippine jungle, flickering
through his mind for fifty years.

This luscious flavor now on my tongue
pulling out thoughts of him,
tossed in the bowl of memories

heavy in my hands
now that he has been released
to the earth, he so carefully tended.

-Suzanne Murray

WRITING EXERCISE TO PLAY WITH: Use different fruit for your writing prompt: oranges, lemon, watermelon, figs, blackberries, . . .or whatever one pops into your head. Have fun.

Recently in my morning writing class I was explaining if you get your mind out of the way to allow what wants to be written from the place of your deeper wisdom and knowing, (aka the intelligence of your heart) then what truly wants to be written will flow out. I exclaimed, “You could write about kumquats and you will end up in the story that wants to be told. So I then gave the class the assignment to write from the word kumquats. This seemed to stall out the rational mind allowing it more easily to surrender to the creative flow and everyone wrote from a deeper and more imaginative place

Writing Exercise: Start a ten minute freewrite with the word kumquats. Remember to really let go and let the writing lead.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. – Albert Einstein

You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born . . .
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of new clarity.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

I often say in my writing and creativity coaching classes that your imagination is smarter than you are; like intuition it gives you a deeper, faster, more expanded means of gaining critical insights and making important connections than the more limited workings of your linear, rational mind. Whether you want to write, engage your creativity more fully or develop an ability for creative problem solving, your imagination is an essential tool. To exercise your imagination try the age old favorite of looking for shapes in the clouds; or go sit outside on a bench to watch people go by and make up stories about their lives; or go to a park and lean against a tree and imagine what it would say to you if it could talk; or lay down on the earth and ask her what simple thing you could do to help the planet. Then be open to the ideas, images or thought that arise in your mind.

One exercise I like to work with is asking advice of an imaginary mentor. You think of a question and then write the answer yourself as if you are getting a response from someone you admire. You can ask Einstein, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson or your grandmother. A woman in one of my classes did this exercise and received what was clearly really good advice. Unaccustomed to using her imagination in this way she asked, “how do I know if I am actually channeling this person or if I’m making it up”. It’s a great question because when we use our imagination it will feel and seem like we are making it up. And that’s exactly how the imagination works. We have a hard time trusting the information and ideas we get because we live in a culture that dismisses the power of the imagination but saying, “oh, you’re just making that up” or we tell our children “it’s just your imagination”.  Imagination is a tool of human consciousness that is underdeveloped in the modern world. Yet the more you engage it and play with it the stronger the connection becomes  and you will begin to feel the quiet excitement and joy that comes from expanding this ability, that will give you new ways to looking at problems and solving them.

You can even ask your imagination for suggestions on how best to cultivate it. Sit quietly for five minutes following the flow of your breath and calming your mind. Then be open to what your imagination has to say to you. Try writing without thinking for ten minutes as if you were taking dictation from your imagination. Or you could ask your imagination what it wants from you and then answer the question by writing or drawing or even spontaneous movement where you let the thoughts and feelings flow.

Imagination is one way we access our deeper mind; the estimated 93% that we don’t use in our ordinary lives. It is a place where you shed your ego, where sparks fly and time stands still. It requires a bit of solitude and idleness. It asks that you slow down and sit still with your mind clear and expectant. It asks that you be willing to play.

My first winter writing journey to Yosemite with a group in mid March was a great success. We stayed at the Yosemite Bug – Rustic Mountain Resort – Cabins, Restaurant, Health Spa, Hostel in Midpines 25 miles outside the Yosemite Valley in a two room cabin to ourselves .  We met up Friday evening for dinner in the on site cafe that offers some really good food, and followed up with an evening of writing. In the morning we took the the bus to the Valley. It was great to be able to move back and forth from side to side to take in the beauty all the way into the Valley. As we got up into the Valley we where greeted by fresh snow all the way down to the floor making the experience even more extraordinary.

After being dropped off at the Yosemite Lodge we walked to the base of Yosemite Falls where we sat in silence taking in the magnificence of the rushing water and then proceeded along a quiet path to the museum devoted to the native people of the area. A man of Miwok descent was on duty and happily answered our questions.

We then wrote and ate lunch sitting in the sun on granite boulders beside the tumbling waters of the Merced River below Vernal Falls.

We walked up to the Mirror Lake area where we were directly under Half Dome where we were greeted by the thundering sound of snow cascading off the face as the sun loosened it’s grip.

We then made our way to the historic Ahwahnee Hotel before returning to Yosemite Falls to catch the bus back to the Yosemite Bug Resort. That evening we enjoyed another fine meal in the cafe and everyone worked on their writing afterward. Sunday morning was devoted to writing and sharing as a group.

I also provided special instruction on to use an acorn cap for a whistle. Two members of our group practiced as we waited for the bus.

We really had a great time and I’m looking forward to bringing more groups to this place of great beauty and spirit during the quieter times of fall, winter and spring.

It’s not enough to have a dream or vision for your work, creativity or life and just visualize the intended outcome. You have to take action; and it’s easier to get started and keep going if you take a series of baby steps. Just one small step toward the life you really want will get you there. My favorite story about the power of taking small daily actions comes from David Whyte, in his book Crossing the Unknown Sea. He tells of working for a nonprofit while holding the vision of making a living from his poetry. Since he wasn’t doing anything to turn the idea into reality, he began to feel exhausted. He asked his friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast to tell him about exhaustion and Brother David responded “the solution to exhaustion is not rest, it is wholeheartedness. At that point David Whyte began taking one small step a day towards his vision of making a living as a poet. Some days he memorized a poem, other days he made phone calls and he let people know about his dream. By day 273 he got a call from a consciousness raising conference at Asilomar where one of the speakers had canceled and they wanted to know if David could take his place. That launched David Whyte on a career where he uses poetry to talk about the life of the soul. This eventually lead to his being invited to do this work in corporate America and he makes a six figure annual income from his poetry.

Whether you have a creative project in mind or you want to make major changes in your life, break your goals down into small action steps and take one each day. Then with every step congratulate yourself for moving closer toward your dream. If you try to make big leaps toward your goals you usually meet with too much resistance and fear that stops you. Small daily actions allow you to sneak under the radar of your resistance to change and stretch your comfort zone in a manageable way.

The best kind of action is inspired action where you listen to your heart or the still small voice within. You take action not out of the sense that you’ve got to make something happen but out of an inner knowing that this is the right step to take. You may have the intuition to go to a place for coffee that you don’t usually go to but while ordering your latte, you run into someone you haven’t seen in years who has a contact that will help you on your way.

Years ago I heard Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney give a lecture at the University of Washington. In the middle of this very academic speech, he paused, threw up both his hands and said, “oh, just write for the joy of it” and then dipped back into the lecture. I don’t remember anything else from the talk but Heaney’s sudden burst of inspiration stayed with me because I think it really captured an essential element to being creative.

Whether you are cooking a great meal, growing a beautiful garden, writing a poem or singing in the community choir, you likely feel a deep sense of satisfaction and a joyfulness that comes with being creative. Creativity draws on the best of human nature: perception, imagination, intellect, inspiration, courage, intuition, and empathy. The urge to create asks us to bask in the experience of the world, to see, feel, taste, hear, and smell the magnificence around us.  It allows us to celebrate, with the spirit of gratefulness for every aspect of our lives, the beauty and complexity the world offers. It can help us make meaning from our sufferings.

Being creative also breaks us free from our ruts and habits allowing us to look at the world anew. We are able to tell a  story that touches others, envision a unique way of solving a problem or offer counsel with fresh  clarity, even if we have struggled with the same material or ideas a hundred times before. Embracing our creativity allows us to tap a deeper more insightful way of knowing that expands beyond our conscious mind.

I think being creative feels so good because it connects us to divine imagination and when we actively participate in developing  and fulfilling our gifts it feels like a mystical experience. We intuit that we are connected to something larger than ourselves which is perhaps the greatest gift that comes from following our creative urges. Early in my work as a writer when I  became aware that I was writing from an inspired sense of flow, I would get this urge to look around the room to see where is was coming from because I sensed it was exactly coming from me. Now I am just always deeply grateful when I tap fully into that vein and welcome it with a sense of grace.

In looking for your own ways of being creative you can start by celebrating your uniqueness. There never was, nor ever will be, anyone exactly like you. In exploring your uniqueness there is often a central preoccupation, an interest or passion that runs through your life? There can also be more than one. If you can’t name it right now, think of something that you are fascinated by again and again. The possibilities are infinite, reaching from needlework to rock climbing, from bird watching to playing the piano, from English country dancing to writing haiku, from gardening to giving foot massages. Look for what brings you joy and then begin taking actions to embrace your creativity and enjoy the process.

The blood means nothing;
the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood,
moves the blood       – William Carlos Williams

People have lived in Ireland for about 7000 years settling there after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. The burial tombs at Newgrange are a thousand years older than the pyramids. On Winter Solstice a single beam of light lasting for seventeen minutes shines into the middle of the tombs. It’s thought that this might be intended to allow the souls to ride the beam to wherever they needed to go.

The Celts arrived in Ireland about 4000 years ago. Since Ireland was never invaded by the Romans the influence of the Celts is most keenly preserved there. The Irish language (one of the forms of Gaelic) is derived from the ancient language of the Celts. Still spoken as the everyday language in parts of Ireland, it is so different from English that translation is difficult. There are no words for yes and no. There are words to express how when you love a place, the place loves you back. The language is earth-based and sensual, reflecting the fact that the Celts saw no separation between themselves and the land that sustained them. The word for the land and the people is one word, currah. The Celts had no written language so information was passed on through a rich oral and storytelling tradition which lives on today. The reverence for words is also expressed in the Irish prominence in English literature and the fact that in Ireland books of poetry are bestsellers.

Some years ago Ireland began calling to me. My grandparents came from Ireland and settled in San Francisco where my father was born; part of the generation of Americans who left behind their culture roots in order to assimilate. Yet on my first trip to Ireland as the plane swept low on approach to the Shannon airport and saw at the edge of the runway, a stone paddock holding a lone sheep, tears began to trickle down my cheeks as the word home echoed through my mind. I told this story to a native Irish speaker I know who lives now in California and she responded, “Well now that would be the ancestors winking in and out welcoming you home.” I found in Ireland not only a feeling of home but a sense of the sacred in the air. Since then I’ve studied the history, the myths and begun to learn the language and continue to feel the pull of the magic and enchantment of the Celtic imagination that lingers in the misty Irish air and moves I think in all who have some Irish blood.

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently, there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is not possibility. . .of saying, I’ll do it if I feel like it. – John Steinbeck

Woody Allen said that ninety five percent of life is showing up. This is especially true when it comes to our writing. If you have a hard time showing up as consistently as you would like, give yourself permission to return to picking up the thread of your work just a little bit at a time. Lower your standards on what you think you should be able to accomplish. Be willing to forgive yourself for all the times you have failed to show up to your work. Honor that there will likely always be a part of you who wants to write and a part of you that is resistant to the letting go that is required to really engage the creative mind. This can be very liberating. Writing is not unlike training to run a marathon. You start out running a few blocks and you work your way up each day to the full twenty six miles. In your writing this can translate into doing “freewriting” or stream of consciousness writing for ten minutes a day for a month then building up to showing up for longer periods of time where you also play with the art of revision and work on finishing a piece. In working with my students and coaching clients I focus in part on learning to fall in love with the process and to find joy in simply showing up to the creative work. Then the writing becomes it’s own reward, free of the expectations of what we think it needs to be and we learn to allow what wants to be born out of our creative spirit.

Author Ray Bradbury keeps a file of opening lines and titles of stories yet to be written. Try this. Make a list of all the stories within you that really want to be told. Then pick one and write on the theme for at least ten minutes a day for a week (or better yet for a month) and see how that feels. Have it be okay that some of what you write may feel uninspired. It all counts as practice that helps you to develop the habit to showing up to your work and evolve your own writing voice and style. The more you show up the more likely you are to hit the zone where your creativity really starts to flow and magic happens.

Living in uncertain times, we need some kind of certain presence which is independent of our outside accomplishments, which is independent of any shallow definitions of what it means to be successful. – David Whyte

Albert Einstein said, The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. I think that is why now more than ever it’s important for each of us to embrace our creativity in whatever form that calls to us and feels most enlivening. In our schooling we were taught to focus on the left brain activities of the three “Rs” reading, writing and arithmetic with little attention paid the right brain.

On my recent trip to Ireland I told an Australian man I met about my commitment to working with people to engage with the “I” words; imagination, inspiration, innovation and intuition which are right brain activities. He smiled, and responded, you really are from California aren’t you. I laughed and said “yes”. California especially the San Francisco Bay Area has long been fertile ground to new ways of doing things and looking at the world.

An architect I know who was born and raised in the Midwest once shared the idea that all the innovation and openness to change that is a trademark of the Bay Area might be related to the hilly topography. Our minds constantly have to adjust to new perspectives as we move through the landscape. Current discoveries in neuroscience suggest that you can enhance brain function by looking up from what you are doing and changing your focus during the day. When I work with people to help to engage creatively I recommend that they make changes in habitual behavior like eating different foods, driving a different way home from work, or changing the order that they put their clothes on in the morning. Any time you do something new and different you begin to build new neural nets in your brain. It’s also why activities like daydreaming or writing from the stream of consciousness where we let our right brain run in seemingly random directions can help us to come up with new ways of looking at a problem.

If you want get more experience connecting to the 95% of our brain/mind that scientist say we don’t use, try the practice of writing a tad faster than you can think to outrun the rational, strategic mind and let the ideas spill out on the page. Or you can try brainstorming on paper by putting the central idea or question in the middle of the page and draw the related ideas that come to you like satellites around the central idea. Also once you start thinking about a new idea notice the thoughts that pop into your head while you are driving, walking, doing the dishes or otherwise occupying the rational mind. Neuroscientists have actually shown that when you let the stream of consciousness flow our brain is actually activating more neurons and brain cells. The next time you have a problem to solve try letting your mind run and be open to all the ideas that surface. Think about some aspect of the world today that could use some creative solution and see what you come up with. Creativity is a natural human gift we all have. It just need to be tended in order to be developed.

The fate of poetry is to teach us to fall in love with the world inspite of history.
– Derek Walcott

New England poet and essayist Donald Hall calls poetry, The Unsayable Said, referring the ineffable quality of poetry; the way it gives voice to experiences that are beyond words. I always think of poetry as something written by the soul for the soul. This is why I find it best to read a poem for the felt sense it offers, allowing the experience of the words to wash over you without necessarily having to understand them with your conscious mind.

Poet Robert Pinsky in his two year term as U.S. Poet Laureate established the Favorite Poem Project. In traveling around the country promoting poetry in town hall style meetings where people came together to share their favorite poems written by someone else he found that everyone, from the members of the corporate board room to the janitorial staff, all had a poem that had really influenced their life. Poet David Whyte, author of The Heart Aroused: the Preservation of the Soul in Corporation, who uses poetry to talk about the life of the soul in the workplace has consulted for major corporation including Boeing, Xerox and IBM. The person who invited David to bring his work into the corporation had explained that there was no language in the corporate world for the kind of real changes that need to take place but that he heard that language in David’s use of poetry.

I think in this time of tremendous change in the world today, poetry holds for us a timeless wisdom and language that provides an awareness of what is really important about the essence of the human experience and our connection to something bigger than ourselves. By way of example I’ve included below four of my favorite poems by poets spanning nine centuries and spawned by different parts of the world; beginning with Rumi, the 13th century Persian Sufi mystic, then German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who lived 1749 to 1832,  then  Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, 1881 – 1958 and finally Nobel Prize winning Poet Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean born in 1930. I encourage you to savour each one, let the words enter your heart and feel poetry’s power to transform and inspire.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher love-making
Sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
And, finally, insane for the light,
You are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…..silence…..Waves…..
—-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

Love After Love

The day will come
when with elation you will greet yourself
arriving at your own door
in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
saying, ‘Sit here. Eat. You will love again
the stranger who was yourself.’

Give wine, give bread
give back your heart to itself
to the stranger who has loved you
all your life
whom you ignored for another
who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
the photographs
the desperate notes
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life

-Derek Walcott

. . . writing is the slow, cumulative way of accepting your life as valid, of accepting yourself over a lifetime, of realizing that your life is important. And it is. It’s all you’ve got. All you ever had for sure. - Richard Hugo

I first started keeping a journal in college and have maintained that practice for over thirty five years. Expanding into creative writing followed as a natural progression of this practice of putting pen to paper along with a deep love of books and working with words. Besides the experience of deep satisfaction that comes from engaging the creative process, writing has also served my personal growth in profound ways.

Journaling differs from creative writing in that it is more a conversation with yourself. It provides a way of making sense of your life experiences and becomes a form of self analysis. Creative writing allows you to more deeply access the unconscious and the insights of your Self. The benefits of engaging the writing process on these different levels are many.

James W Pennebaker, PhD, who spent years researching the healing effects of writing. describes in his book, Opening Up, what many people who have kept a journal often discover on their own, “that if we can create a cohesive personal narrative of our lives and if we can link up our emotions with specific events, then we have the power to take control of how those emotions and events affect our lives.” As Isak Dinesan, the author of Out of Africa, said “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”

Evidence for the positive effects writing has on our physical health is found in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed, “that merely writing about past stressful life experiences results in symptom reduction among patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis.”

Poet May Sarton said that “… the only way through pain … is to go through it, to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means …. Nothing that happens to us, even the most terrible shock, is unusable, and everything has somehow to be built into the fabric of the personality ….” Through writing, we can find order and meaning in everything that has happened to us. Whichever form our writing takes: journaling, poetry, memoir, fiction, or essays; it has the power to heal us and to help us grow.

Recently in one of my ongoing writing classes a participant new to the writing process exclaimed with a sense of happy surprise, “I’m learning so much about myself” I know I am always having that experience when I write. Robert Frost said, ” No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” One of the greatest joys, I get out of writing is when I uncover ways of seeing or perceive that I wasn’t consciously aware of. I’ll stop in the middle of reading over something I had just written and say to myself, “wow I didn’t know I thought that.” It feels good to grasp the deeper threads of meaning in our lives. Writing helps us to form connections with what is going on inside us and with others, allowing us to understand who we are and where and why we do the things we do. It can help us gain a new perspective on habitual behaviors and subconscious patterns that get in the way of living our full potential. Writing can help us to get clear and make the constructive changes in our lives.

There are lots of different ways to use writing for healing and self discovery. You can start by writing about a specific event or situation or relationship. Or begin by writing a letter (that does not get sent) to a person you are having a conflict with in order to more deeply understand what you are really feeling about the situation. Or try writing a dialogue with a pain in your body and ask it what it needs from you as way to tapping the body’s natural ability to heal.

You need to write freely without censoring or worrying about punctuation, spelling or grammar or even how it sounds. Write for ten to twenty minutes without stopping. Don’t edit. Simply write and see what comes out. By allowing what wants to be written without trying to consciously control the flow, you tap into the wisdom of the unconscious and open yourself to the healing power within.

I first encountered the concept of freewriting in 1977 when I found Peter Elbow’s book, Writing with Teachers. Elbow, who had been a professor at MIT, presented this way of working on your writing that is at once simpler and more powerful than any other way I know. I’ve come to believe that most writer’s eventually figure out that in order to write well you have to learn to get out of your conscious mind in order to tap the creative flow. Freewriting helps you to do this. I’ve certainly used the technique extensively to evolve my own writing.

All you do is simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes. If you get stuck you keep writing “Keep the pen moving” until you break free. Sometimes you will produce good writing, sometimes you will produce garbage. The point is to keep writing. The goal is in the process, not the product. It is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all around practice in writing that I know. Freewriting gives practice in focusing, but-not-trying; it helps the conscious self to stand out of the way and let the words be chosen by the sequence of the words themselves or the thought. The benefits are many: it helps with the existential difficulty of facing the blank piece of paper; it is best way to learn to separate the creative process from the editorial process; it’s a good warm up; it helps you to learn to write when you don’t feel like writing; it teaches you to write without thinking; it’s a good outlet for clearing away preoccupations; it’s good for brainstorming; and it improves your writing by leading you to tap a true voice

I started teaching writing workshops almost twenty years ago, where we freewrite for ten minutes and then share what we’ve written in a completely safe and supportive environment. Group members respond to what touches them, what rings true, what they want to hear more about or by parroting back a line that really strike them; all as a way of mirroring the writer’s voice and the potential of the piece. Freewriting allows you to write a tad faster than you can think which gives you access to the unconscious mind. When you have finished you rarely have any idea what you have written and your conscious mind armed with the critic and censor leads you to believe it’s no good. So receiving feedback on what is working in your first draft helps you to learn how to do that for yourself. I write and share with the group because I feel it only works if I’m willing to feel the same vulnerability as everyone else. I’m amazed year after year at the fine writing that emerges from all the different people who come to the workshops and how I can hear a writer’s voice evolve as they continue to work with this process.

Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you. – Robert Olen Butler

About fifteen years ago while attending the poetry workshop at the writer’s conference at Port Townsend, Washington, I had a chance to talk to Robert Olen Butler who was teaching the fiction workshop. While sitting on the grassy knoll above the Puget Sound, he spoke of his time in Vietnam, when he served as military attache in Saigon, where he became fluent in the language. He loved the Vietnamese and would sit on a stoop in the middle of the night engaged in conversation. At the time of the conference, though he had a reputation as a fine writer and a dedicated teacher, all his books were out of print. A few months later, his new collection of short stories, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain won the Pulitzer Prize. The stories, which all involve characters that are Vietnamese, reflect the importance the people and the culture played in Butler’s life and imagination.

Recently I came upon a book of his, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, in which he really emphasizes the importance of writing from the unconscious, the dream mind. He does a beautiful job of describing the difficulties involved as well as the importance of letting go of your linear mind and engaging your sensory and sensual experiences in order to fully tap the creative process.

In my own writing classes I start with a short meditation designed to quiet the mind and drop us all down into the heart mind, making it easier to access the imagination and creative flow. We then work with exercises to help in letting go, trusting the process and allowing what wants to be born out of the well of the subconscious to flow out on to the page. Another key element I learned from Butler in a talk he gave at the conference, is that good writing was full of moment by moment sensual detail. Focusing on the felt sense of an experience, learning to let go and then writing about things that are really important you are key ingredients in developing the art of writing.

The imagination is not interested in two-dimensional reductionism or naively pitting one side against another, dark against light. It is interested in the place where the two sides meet, and what they give birth to when they cross-fertilize each other. That is the heart of creativity. – John O’Donohue

In memory of John O’Donohue, 1954 to 2008

I first met John O’Donohue about 15 years ago when I participated in a workshop he offered with David Whyte in Seattle on the Celtic Imagination. I had signed up because I admired David’s work. I had never heard of John. Yet from the first moment he opened his mouth and words flowed out on a rich Irish accent, I sensed I was in the presence of someone extraordinary. Wisdom rose on his tongue, causing revelations to flood my mind. He spoke of the lack of soul in contemporary culture, calling advertising “schooling in false desire”. That phrase particularly hung in my mind while my pen scratched out pages of notes attempting to capture everything he said. I kept wondering, who is this man? Poet and philosopher with a PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Tubingen in Germany. A Catholic priest by vocation, a role he would eventually relinquish after years of consideration because as he put it “the oxygen had become too scarce and found myself diverging from quite a few of the teachings.” Still he continued to praise the power and importance of the essence of the Christian tradition and the legacy of the great Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross and Hildegard von Bingen.

I waited for several years for the book I knew would come out of him. His first titled Anam Cara, from the Irish words for soul friend was an international bestseller. Followed by Eternal Echoes and Beauty: An Invisible Embrace. I have over the years been repeatedly drawn back to his work. His words slipping under my skin traveling I think from his soul to mine. Rooted deep in the West of Ireland, he lived in a cottage heated with peat and spoke Irish as his everyday language. He was born in County Clare in the unique limestone region of The Burren, the part of Ireland that always pulls me back. From a grounded sense of belonging his mind rode the seas of imagination as he wrote and traveled to speak and teach to a wider world. Every May John held a a ten day rambling retreat in the West of Ireland. I had very much wanted to go one year. Not this year, I had thought but hopefully the next. And now this man who was so vibrantly alive is gone so unexpectedly at age 53, a keen reminder to me to attend to what calls to me without waiting, to ask the question every day, What do I really want to do with the time I’m given, and to show up fully for my life each day.

David Whyte in this eulogy to John said, This is a man who could hold the broad spectrum of human experience together in a fierce, intimate and compassionate way, leavened with a humour that defies easy description and that enlivened everyone around him . . .John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself.

On my most recent trip to Ireland, just before the New Year I arrived at the Green Door Hostel in Drogheda, a small city north of Dublin close to the sacred sites in the Boyne River Valley. In true Irish fashion, Norm the manager, made me warmly welcome. When I told him I was I interested in leading a writing journey to the area, he said “well let me call Richard and see if he’ll want to drop by for a cup of coffee, he knows a lot about the sites.” Richard turned out to be Richard Moore painter and coauthor of “Island of the Setting Sun: In Search of Ireland’s Ancient Astronomers” a book about the astronomically-aligned giant stone monuments, erected over 5,000 years ago that are older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids. Despite their apparent simplicity, these ancient structures were crafted by a community of farmers who were clearly skilled astronomers, engineers and surveyors who made these shrines to honor their beliefs in an afterlife. On my tour of Newgrange, the best preserved and excavated to the monuments I was intrigued to learn that there is no evidence of slavery so these structures were clearly a community effort.

Richard who lives a few doors down from the hostel arrived shortly after and as the kettle began to steam, he referred to a poster he has created call The High Man that hangs on the hostel kitchen wall. Having lived in the area all his life, he had begun studying a map of the ancient roads and noticed that they formed the shape of a figure of a warrior that seemed to mirror the pattern of the constellation Orion. The key sacred sites in the region are located at the knees, the head, the mouth and other key parts of the body. Richard said that in studying the rich history and mythology of this part of Ireland he found the stories corresponded to different aspects of the figure as well.

Knowing something of Irish history and mythology I was amazed by Richard’s depth of knowledge and insight into the region. I was also struck by the sense that this place where myth and history bleed into one another is really fertile ground for the human imagination. Later in exploring the sites on my own I could feel, as I stood in the icy cold, a deep sense of peace rising from the land and the pull these ancient people have on my own imagination. Back at the Green Door Hostel, I mention to Eamonn, the owner, that so little is known about who these ancients were and how they lived. He looks at me with a lively smile a keen sense of irony in his tone and says, “well, we know they knew the world was round.”

Since all writers often experience resistance at facing the blank page it helps to find a pattern in the physical world that can assist you in crossing the threshold into the writing mind. Here are some the elements for you to consider.

Implements: People often ask me when they sign up for one of my writing classes, whether it is best to write with a pen or a computer. The answer, of course, is to find what works best for you.. Some people like the feel of the pen moving across the page. Others, who are fast on the keyboard, sense they can keep up with the flow of ideas more easily that way. If you write with a pen chances are you will find a favorite and stick with it. I write all my first drafts with a rolling ball pen with black ink and a good grip and then revise on the computer.

Ritual: Writing calls for us to enter a different state of mind than our everyday way of thinking, so it helps to use some kind of ritual to signal to the muse or the subconscious that a shift is called for. The most elaborate ritual I’ve heard of came from a poet who wrote only in the mid to late afternoon, in an easy chair, in his pajamas with one cat on his lap. Mine is more simple. I write first thing in the morning before I do anything else, except make my ritual single cup of coffee. I then sit down with it along with my favorite pen to see what want my attention.

Location: I used to have to leave the house and go out for coffee in order to write because I found it easier to face the blank page free from the phone calls that needed to be returned or the toilet bowl that called out for cleaning. Writing is an inherently isolated activity and I like to feel of being part of the world when I do it. I find comfort in the bustel of a cafe that seems to keep my more critical mind occupied while I slip beneath the radar into the creative mind. Other people need complete quiet. It can also be help to set up space in your home just for writing. If you don’t have a room, how about a corner of the bedroom or some other room where you are unlikely to interrupted.

Time: A lot of people write first thing in the morning before they do anything else, while their mind is still close to the dream state and can more easily tap the creative flow which has a similar feel. Doing it first thing makes your creativity a priority. It’s easier to show up for it before you get caught up in the events of the day. Still if you are not a morning person, figure out which part of the day works best. I suggest you write the time in your day planner and get in the habit of showing up on a regular basis, even if it’s only for twenty minutes, even on the days you feel resistance or uninspired. Inspiration often only comes after you have started writing.