Often our rational mind and it’s chatter gets in the way of accessing our inner knowing and wisdom. Here are some different tools that may help. Find the ways that work but for you.

- Oracles: Medicine cards, Tarot, I Ching, Runes, Angel cards, Goddess cards, etc
- Dreams: asking to remember your dreams and keeping a dream journal
- Questions: invite expansion and answers (conclusions limit)
- Knowing your which of your sixth senses is best developed (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance)
- Meditation
- Yoga
- Stretching (opens you up)
- Walking (especially in Nature)
- Whenever your mind is otherwise occupied (driving, doing the dishes, in the shower)
- Asking and paying attention
- Writing (freewriting, mind mapping, dialogue with the Divine)
- Drawing (freedrawing, mandala making)
- Feed your spirit, (do things that make you happy, bring you joy, raise your vibration)
- Paying attention (to signs, synchronicities, hunches, gut senses felt in your body
- Gratitude
- Connecting to your heart
- Connecting to your body and your gut sense

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. – Edgar Allan Poe

To see the world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wildflower.
To hold infinite in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour. – William Blake

Each month the day before I sit down to write my newsletter I ask the question as I hold the intention of wanting to be of service, “what should I write about?” I ask it silently in my mind and then let it go as I go about my day waiting for the answer to come from my imagination. This month the response came as a line from a favorite poem by Mary Oliver called Spring Azures that ends with the line “a life of the imagination”.

The poem begins with Blue Azures, the small blue butterflies that cluster around mud puddles and ends with William Blake, the 18th century English poet, painter and printmaker. (find full poem below). Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake has since been held in high regard for his expressiveness, creativity and the mystical undercurrents within his work as well as the way he embraced the imagination as “Divine” or as “Human existence itself”.

Creativity and imagination are something that tends to get stomped out of us at an early age. We are taught to conform. Daydreaming is punished. Drawing within the lines rewarded. Yet without imagination we are cut off from insights and ideas of expanded states of awareness and the higher realms of consciousness. And as Einstein so brilliantly put the levels thinking that created the problems we are experiencing won’t get us out of them. This is true in our personal lives as well as on a global scale. We need the gifts of our own creativity and imagination now more than ever. This is not just for art but for business, technology, our workplace and our homes. Accessing our imagination can assist us in every aspect of our lives.

So try this. Ask the question, “What would it take for me to bring more creativity and imagination into my life?” Then let it go and be open to an answer that comes as a song, or a poem fragment or a book that comes to you or an ah…ha that pops into your mind or however you are able to hear your imagination. Keep asking questions to invite your imagination to emerge to help expand the possibilities in your life.

Spring Azures

In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows―
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking—

don’t seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings—
blue ones—
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
and seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city—
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the the imagination.

- Mary Oliver

Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learnt. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and where appropriate profits. – Edward de Bono

Everyone is creative. It is a natural gift we are all born with that we actually have to be schooled out of. Watch young children at play and see how they naturally use their imagination. Consider their willingness to draw outside the lines and the way they don’t judge what they are doing. They are “just” playing, having fun, trying different possibilities.

Play is a large part of what creativity is all about. Once we start playing with an idea or any creative form we then need to be open to the inspiration that will come through when our everyday mind is quiet or distracted by routine tasks like doing the dishes, driving our car, going for a walk, or taking a shower. At that point the bright idea or solution rises up out of the subconscious almost like something out of a dream and we need to write it down or intentionally remember it or like a dream image we will not be able to recall it later on.

One way to claim your creativity is to begin asking questions like “what would it take to solve this problem” and then don’t try to figure out the answer or solution with your rational mind. Rather let it go and then just notice the thoughts or ideas that pop into your head during the day. This can include the urge to turn on the radio where you hear a song or program that provides you with an ah. ha moment. Or you pull a book from the shelf and open it at random and a bookmark falls out with a quote that gives you another idea. Or we wake up in the middle of the night compelled to start writing. We are all different and creativity speaks to each of us in different ways. Part of being creative is learning what works best for you.

Another benefit from learning to work with your creativity is that we naturally experience a sense of joy and excitement since we are operating in an expanded state that feels really good. Start playing and see what happens.

The instant trivial as it is
is all we have, unless. . .unless
things the imagination feeds upon
the scent of a rose, startle us anew.

-William Carlos Williams

When I started to work on this article I had originally intended that the title “Coming to Your Senses” would refer to how important actively using all our senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste) is in engaging our creativity and imagination and accessing inspiration for our lives.

Then I flashed on the fact that the phrase is also an idiom that refers to someone who has been doing something that is clearly a mistake and finally realizes it and begins to act more in alignment with what is right for them. This has me wondering about the origins of the expression and the true value of really occupying our senses. Jean Houston, one of the founders of the human consciousness movement suggests, “that enhanced human capacities begin with what we generally think of as our most concrete reality, our own body.” And opening more fully to experience all our senses can help us inhabit our bodies and the knowing, wisdom and “gut instincts” that it holds for us.

People who are highly creative have a vivid sense memory. Memory of things we delight in can actually help us develop our senses. Remember biting into a ripe, juicy peach with the juices running sticky down your chin. You can do this for all your senses. This exercises your imagination as well.

For many the use of their senses has largely atrophied. Western culture especially values concepts and ideas over direct sensory experience. I was lucky enough to grow up within sight, sound and scent of the sea and throughout my childhood we often went camping so I developed a closeness to the natural world where opening your senses to fully experience the world is a delight.

So spending time in Nature, enjoying a good meal or taking a hot scented bath can really help you more fully embody your senses which in turn gives you access to your creative gifts and more of your full potential.

Here’s a poem that came out of engaging my senses in an experience in the world.

Spiritual Practice

A flock of bluebirds flutter
across a fallow field,

their cheerful chirps
ring the air like a temple bell,

calling me out
of my thought-churned mind,

their azure-blue backs
burnt-orange bellies,

holding me,
in the moment.

- Suzanne Murray

Most of us have never been encouraged to use our imagination. In fact we have often been discouraged with comments like “stop that daydreaming” or “why are you doing wasting time staring out the window.” When we are engaged in these activities we are letting our subconscious/unconscious mind run free to make new connections and give birth to new ideas. Rather than being encouraged to dream big, to ask questions or expand our awareness beyond the domain of our linear rational mind ,we have been consistently schooled in restricting this wonderful potential.

Our imaginations are like muscles. If they haven’t been used they atrophy and we to strengthen them to allow for optimum access. As we start to exercise our imaginations we actually form new neural connections in our brain. To start we need to relax the constant mental chatter that has us focused on the past or future and allow ourselves to be present in the moment. Our imagination gives us access so much more of who we really are and what we know and the more we learn to use the more we are able to open up to expanded ways of being.

Try this. Take three deep breaths all the way down into your belly and with each exhalation let everything go and let the peace of simply being present in the moment enter you. Then imagine being in a favorite place. What do you see. If you are not visual, don’t worry about it. Instead focus on what it feels like to be there. What sounds, scents, tastes are involved. Use all your senses. The body can’t distinguish between a real experience and something that is imagined so this is a great way to give yourself a mini vacation without leaving home.

This is one of my favorite poems for the holiday season. It reminds me of how much poetry really illuminates what essentil in our lives.

Amazing Peace

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

- Maya Angelou

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters - Richard Hugo

Poet Richard Hugo, who started the creative writing program at the University of Montana and taught there for 30 years, thought that writing allowed you to more readily make sense of your life and see the value of it. He saw the practice of writing as “a 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.”

I find that whether I’m writing essays or poems or reflecting in the pages of my journal that I gain increased clarity about who I am, what I value and how I see the world. I tap a deeper thread of meaning in my life that helps me makes sense of everything I have ever done and everything that has ever happened. It helps me put things in perspective and opens me up to new insights.

You don’t have to “be a writer” to benefit. The practice of stream of consciousness writing where you just let the words flow uncensored gives you access to an expanded way to knowing and deeper wisdom. It gives you access to the powerhouse of your subconscious/unconscious (that 93 percent of our mind we are not usually aware of.) It’s a great way to get answers to the questions our heart and soul want to ask like What do I need to know right now?or What is trying to emerge in my life right now? Just play with it and see what happens.

Well, you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you’re completely enraptured, you’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. . . .The idea is to be. . .so saturated with it that there’s no future or past, it’s just an extended present in which you’re making meaning. - Mark Strand, poet

The thoughts that come to you are more valuable than the ones you seek. – Joubert

Some years ago I read a wonderful book by Matthew Fox, titled, Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet. In this book Fox, a former Catholic priest who had been censured by the Church for putting forth a doctrine of original blessing as opposed to original sin, suggests that when we are creative we become co-creators with creation. I had been involved in creativity for a long time by I read his book; first with dance and photography and then a couple of decades spent writing so I knew immediately the truth of what he was saying. I remember the first time I really got on a roll with my writing and I knew that something good was coming out of my pen, I actually stopped and looked around the room to see where it was coming from because I knew it wasn’t exactly coming from me. Since then I’ve come to the sense that it’s Spirit or my Higher Self working through me and I’ve been able to integrate working with these mysterious forces as I write.

In fact, the word Muse has its origins in being intiated into the mysteries. And its important to understand that this connection is available to everyone not just a select few who are somehow born with this special gift. It is also not restricted to the arts. The gift of creativity is woven deep into our being. Everytime we solve a problem we didn’t “think” we could solve we are drawing on this invisible resource. We experience it in cooking, gardening, decorating our homes, raising our children, healing, teaching and business when we get the inspiration to do something in a new and expanded way. When we tap into this ability it feels great, it feels divine. Regardless of where this creative inspiration comes from I’ve found that the more I show up to the practice of writing or anything else, the more I have a feel for working with this creative flow. It’s like a muscle that gets stronger with use.
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Joan King, a neuroscientist who has studied brain activity describes in her book Cellular Wisdom, “While such brainstorming [found in creative flow] is occurring, more and more neurons and neural pathways are being activated in the neural net. Consciousness acts like a spotlight, shining here and there, making connections, illuminating thought and memories, trying out possible solutions. As the process continues, more and more neurons are recruited, activating more of the great intermediate [neural] net.” The key here is to stop thinking with your linear mind and let the creative imagination really run. Our “small” linear mind has to get out of the way to let the “big” mind make its leaps and forge its connections.

Consider all the ways you are already being creative and what it feels like. Is there a sense of excitement and expansion when you exercise your creativity?. What would it takes for you to build more muscle in this area? I think the changes and challenges in the world today are actually calling forth this ability in each of us. They are asking us to embody our creativity in every area of our lives and in our contributions to the world. The beauty is that creation is waiting to help. We just need to show up, let go and step into the flow of being a co-creator. Our willingess is our invitation.

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

What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time. – Stanley Kunitz

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. In my writing classes, I say “your imagination is smarter than you are.” Imagination is the way we access our deeper mind; the 95% or so that we don’t use in our ordinary lives. It is the place where you shed your ego, where sparks fly and time stands still. It requires a bit ofsolitude and idleness. It asks that you slow down and sit still with your mind clear and expectant.

Here’s an exercise to play with to help you tap into your imagination. 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. Do a ten minute freewrite as if you were taking dictation from your imagination. Or you could ask what it wants from you and then answer the question yourself in a freewrite where you let your mind run. The more you play with your imagination the easier it is to access it.

I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination. – John Keats

As I witness the growing Occupy movement that through peaceful means is focusing on the need to transform systems that really are not working for the good of the whole, I have been thinking about how important it is to combine this effort with the use of the expanded awareness of the imagination to envision what we desire the changes to look like. Imagination after all is a force that can take us places we have never been before.

Barbara Marx Hubbard, the 81 years young founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, thinks the movement, “is planting seeds of the evolution of democracy itself, a democracy that expresses the hopes and aspirations of the people, for the common good.” This grassroots movement is questioning the existing structures that are all top down hierarchies: like corporations, organized religions, and nations states. It’s obvious that these systems are in need to repair and restructuring, the question is do we want to allow the changes to occur by default or do we want to hold a vision for the new earth and create from there.

In her recent newsletter Barbara Marx Hubbard, quoted Buckminster Fuller, the great “design science” evolutionary and futurist as saying that “we have the technology, resources and know-how to make of this world a 100% physical success for all people, without destroying our environment.” We need to come up with better designs for social systems, governing, economics, health care, transportation. How do we create better designs.

This leads me back to the imagination; this incredible ability we all have to be alchemists, to create something from apparently nothing. We start playing around with an idea and let our subconscious mind or imagination run and different possibilities come to us after we have let it go and are out for a walk, in the shower, washing the dishes, driving to the store or staring out the window. From this place we can come up with creative solutions and new structures that are inaccessible to the rational mind. As Einstein said, “Logic will get you from A to B and imagination will take you everywhere.” Use of our imagination fuels innovation.

Each one of us can contribute our unique gifts to this visioning and help to create the world we really would like to live in. To begin we start holding an image of what we want that world to look like. For a bit of inspiration I’ve included the lyrics to the John Lennon song Imagine, which I think carries the Spirit of the changes that the heart of the Occupy movement is asking for.

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

- John Lennon

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat. – Steve Jobs

I call innovation one of the “i” words, like imagination, inspiration, intuition and illumination, it is a process that rises from an expanded state of awareness. I’ve long thought these five words should replace the three “r”s as the focus of our schools.

Innovation is defined as introducing something new, be it a new idea, method or device. I remember hearing an interview with Steve Jobs where he described inventing the floppy drive; the way he spoke of trying lots of different strategies before it finally worked.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point, has identified two types of innovators. The rare conceptual innovators like Picasso who burst on the scene in the early 1900s and revolutionized how we think about art. And the much more prevalent experimental innovators like Cezanne, who worked endlessly by trial and error to find the look that captured his vision. Picasso dazzled the European art world as a young man with his sudden passion to show a new way to do things; Cezanne’s masterpieces did not come until he was in his 50s and then they came in a rush when 40 of his most famous works were produced in a few years.

I think it helps to understand how innovation works. Like creativity in general I think it helps to understand that it is a process that often involves trial and error as well as a learning curve. So many think that this is the domain of a select few rather than a possibility for everyone. Now more than ever we need people willing to exercise their natural ability to innovate. And it is not restricted to the arts. The development of microlending to help people in the third world to because self reliant is an innovation

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure. – Colin Powell

My friend Melissa recently sent me a synopsis that a friend of hers had written after attending a Bank of America forum that featured a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, author of insightful books about the times we live in including Tipping Point, Brink, and Outreach.

Apparently Gladwell is working on a new book about entrepreneurial success — why so many try to be among the 10% of new ventures that succeed. He described that perseverance and belief are more important than talent or luck. He noted that while most people believe the rock band Fleetwood Mac burst on the seen in the early 70s with two monster-hit albums, he points out that the first of these was actually the 16th the band had recorded. These musicians simply never gave up and kept trying various ideas until they found the sound and rhythms that worked.

As someone who has been a writer and writing teacher as well as a creativity coach for decades, I know that practice and perseverance are equally important in our creative endeavors. It’s an idea that I have to work to get across to students and clients, since especially with creativity people think that the work should come to them by magic and inspiration rather than by showing up to everyday to practice and see what happens. I suggest that they learn to fall in love with the process as I have done so that the act of writing is it’s own reward. Outside recognition in the form of publication or awards offers a momentary thrill, but it is the work itself that provides the deepest source of satisfaction.

Gladwell concluded that entrepreneurial success depends on the perseverance and desire of the contributor and the commitment and patience of sponsors. Unfortunately, Gladwell said, those two commodities are in short supply in today’s market. He expressed concern that the frenetic search for instant rewards is dooming those who seek it – as well as the country — to future failures.

I think the same impatience and misunderstanding about what it takes to succeed keeps people from really being able to tap their full creative potential.

Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from. – Jody Foster

It is never too late to be who you might have been. – George Eliot

The word weird is derived from Old English. Originally spelled wyrd it was a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to our fate or personal destiny. In Beowulf, one of the oldest book in the English language, there is a reference to the hero being on his weird way or his destined path. The word weird further evolved over time to refer to that which is strange in a supernatural way.

In contemporary times the original definition and connotation of the word has been lost and we associate it withbeing odd or strange. Anyone who acts outside the limited parameters of socially acceptable behavior or the boundaries of what we think of as normal we call weird. As social creatures we want to feel that we belong so we often resist expressing our uniqueness since we don’t want to be seen as weird or different.

People have been calling me weird since high school and I remember the first time I said ‘thank you” when they did. I must have realized even then that there was something good about being weird. The label came largely from the fact that I was being more creative, playful, imaginative and expressing more of my authentic self than we were being school to do. Being creative shakes up the norm. It adds spice, color and joy to the world. I’ve come to feel that that is the job of the artist or those who express their creativity in any way. If each of us is going to bring these unique gifts to the world, we have to be willing to be a little weird. We need to accept and embrace the ways we are different even as we know we are part of the whole. We need to claim our own callings that come as the still small voice within us that may suggest a course of action that our mind and the people around us will think is weird but our spirit knows is the right thing to do.

What if it’s our weirdness the world needs right now. What if you being you is the change you can be that will ripple out to transform the world in positive ways and bring more joy and satisfaction to your own life. What if a willingness to be seen as little weird is what is required to be on your destined path. What if weird could be the new normal?

Life is “trying things to see if they work.” – Ray Bradbury

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. -James Joyce

Recently I worked with a client who was really blocked in her writing and painting. Through our coaching we were able to discover that the root of the block was a fear of making mistakes. Once she identified that bugaboo her writing and painting started to flow again.

Our culture and educational systems teach us that mistakes aren’t okay; that there are real negative consequences to making mistakes. Yet the only way we learn is by our willingness to make mistakes and see what works and what doesn’t.

From my own years of writing I have had countless pages that were practice that never really took off and I had many scraps of poems that were never finished. I always knew that this was part of the learning process of being a writer. Yet I also found that the stories and poems that really wanted to be completed would stay with me through the process of growing in my craft. This really helped me to show up and just play with the process and allow what wanted to born come through me. This and just being able to play with the process is really an important part of being creative in any form you work with.

A friend once told me about a book on creating art that was called, One Continuous Mistakes. I never bothered to read it because just hearing the title was all I needed. My creative self immediately intuited the truth of it. I felt could feel that the secret to really being in the creative process is indeed a willingness to make mistakes and see where they lead.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. – Arthur Koestler

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. – Albert Einstein

Sometimes creativity just means the daily work of helping others to see a problem in a different way. – Joseph Badaracco

Creativity comes from awakening and directing our higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the Universe. – I Ching

Creativity takes courage. – Henri Matisse

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. – George Lois

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. – Edward de Bono

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Pablo Picasso

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music. – Herbie Hancock

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain
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What if your life where a blank piece of paper or a bare canvas? What new story would you write for yourself, what picture would you paint? What if each small step you take toward what you really desire is like a brush stroke on the canvas where you are creating that life? What life do you want to create for your self? What creation do you want to live into?

In last month’s newsletter I touched on the power of asking questions in opening up to all that is possible for us. Questions like: what else is possible, what would it take to change this situation, or if I had a magic wand I would. . . act as an invitation to the bigger part of our mind or perhaps even to universal intelligence.

I recently heard that your eyes/brain process 10 million bits of information a second and our conscious mind is aware of only 40 of those bits. This fits with the research that shows that our subconscious mind represents about 95% of our mind and our conscious mind making up the remaining 5%. I think being creative in any way is really about learning to work with our bigger, more powerful mind and higher inspiration that is able to draw on all the knowledge and knowing that our subconscious/unconscious mind.

As someone who has worked with various forms of creativity for most of my life I am quite accustomed to giving the seed of an idea over to my subconscious or divine inspiration and letting that part of me that I don’t really understand come up with fresh connections and perspectives. That’s how I am writing even this newsletter. I work on it for a bit then leave it alone while I work on something else and I have a vague sense that my bigger mind is weaving the threads of different ideas and images into a coherent whole. Even before I start writing a newsletter, I ask the question, What’s the subject for this month and see what comes to me as I go about my day. I rely on higher inspiration for everything and questions are my point of access.

The key to working with questions is to ask and then let them go knowing that the answer will show up. Don’t try to figure out it in your head but rather start paying attention to, the bright idea that just pops into your head , the sign, the hunch, the intuition, the sense of what to do that often shows up in a way that surprises us. I know you have all had the experience of trying to solve a problem with your conscious mind and after a few unsuccessful hours, you get up from your desk, get into your car, drive home and as you are pulling up to your house the solution just comes to you as an ah…ha moment. That’s your bigger mind at work on the problem you asked it to solve and in letting in go on the drive home you gave your subconscious mind the space to deliver the answer.

Often we are so caught up in the busyness of our daily lives that we don’t take the time to imagine what actually might be possible for us. Questions are wonderful tool for expanding your world and helping you to access more of your creative potential in every area of your life. The more you play with asking questions and looking out for the answers the more you strengthen your ability receive and trust what shows up. Play with it, be curious, have fun. In this changing world we all need to living and working from an expanded sense of who we are. Questions can help.

Jan Phillips in her book The Art of Original Thinking – The Making of a Thought Leader, states that “some of the greatest thinkers today are in agreement about the power of our consciousness to alter our circumstances. From biologists to business leaders, mystics to medical professionals, philosophers to philanthropists, individuals are speaking out about the role of our thoughts in the unfolding of our realities. Simultaneously, the world of quantum physics is seeding our fertile mindscapes with findings that propel us beyond all known imaginings.” The essence of this idea is that we can affect not only our own personal reality but also the collective reality of the planet by what we think about, focus our attention on, the images with hold in our hearts and minds. I’ve long had this intuition myself but have hesitated to speak of it because the rational mind, my rational mind, thinks it sounds crazy or impossible. Yet now it’s really clear to me that we need to find new ways of thinking and perceiving that are beyond the rational mind. There are two great quotes from Einstein that really speak to this, the first is “imagination is more important than knowledge” and the second is “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Some years ago I heard of something called The Maharishi Effect where a group of people went to Washington D.C. in August with the intention to meditate on peace and community coherence while holding the collective intention of lower the crime rate by 25%. The chief of police laughed saying, “it would take 6 feet of snow to lower the crime rate by that much.” By the end of the month the crime rate had dropped 25% and the chief of police was a believer. They have repeated this “experiment” in cities around the world with the same result and found that it only took 1% of the population hold the space and energy for the whole community to shift. When they stopped the meditation the crime rate and tensions went back up.

I’m an active participant in something called The Global Coherence Initiative, which was started by the Institute of Heartmath. It is a science-based, co-creative project that unites people in heart-focused care and intention, to facilitate the shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace. On their website at www.glcoherence.org, they have a virtual prayer room where people gather at set times to send heart felt energy for a period of up to 15 minutes to places in crisis from natural disasters like Japan or political chaos like the Middle East. Focused care has also been sent to the Earth with the intention of calming the severe weather patterns and allowing for the earth changes to occur more gently.

Part of this project includes a group internationally renowned scientists and engineers who are designing and setting a system with stations around the world that monitors fluctuations in the Earth’s geomagnetic field and pulsations and resonances associated with ionospheric excitations which can allow them to predict major earth events like earthquakes. And one of the ideas is that the collective focused care of higher human consciousness has the capacity to reduce the severity of such events.

This is why I’m so keen on supporting developing the intelligence of our hearts and the expansiveness of the imagination. This is where we will find the new level of thinking to solve the problems we face in the world.

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. – Robert Frost

One of the great pleasures of writing is that you learn things about yourself and the way you think that you might not otherwise uncover. Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Ted Kooser has a real gift for pulling together really unexpected images and ideas in his poems. His poems are complex and elegant while still being very accessible. Here’s one of his poems that certainly surprised me and probably surprised him as well.

Etude by Ted Kooser

I have been watching a Great Blue Heron
fish in the cattails, easing ahead
with the stealth of a lover composing at letter,
the hungry words looping and blue
as they coil and uncoil, as they kiss and sting.

Let’s say that he holds down an everyday job
in an office. His blue suit blends in.
Long days swim beneath the glass top
of his desk, each one alike. On the lip
of each morning, a bubble trembles.

No one has seen him there, writing a letter
to a woman he loves. His pencil is poised
in the air like the beak of a bird.
He would spear the whole world if he could,
toss it and swallow it whole.

WRITING EXERCISE: Using the poem above as inspiration pick as your writing prompt a scene you see out the window or an event you witnessed or an experience you had during the day. Just start writing about it and see where it leads you. Often we don’t know why a story is really calling to us to write it until we are well into the process. The best writing comes from a willingness to be surprised.

I am celebrating at least three major crises—in energy, economy and climate—now confronting us globally and simultaneously, adding up to the greatest challenge in all human history. That challenge is what, and why, I celebrate. Nothing short of a fundamental review, revisioning and revising of our entire way of life on planet Earth is called for. What an amazing time of opportunity this is! – Elisabeth Sahtouris, evolutionary biologist and futurist

Visionary evolutionary biology Elisabet Sahtouris explains, “We create our own reality and Nature shows the way. Look around you and note that everything human-made in sight originated as an idea in someone’s mind. Isn’t it obvious that we create our reality from our consciousness? Once we acknowledge how fundamental consciousness is to all human experience, including all our creative action, we see that scientific models of nature themselves are created within human consciousness . . .”

I think that our consciousness holds the key to making the changes needed in our world today and that imagination is one of it’s tools. Albert Einstein said that the level of consciousness that caused the problems we face will not be able to solve them. He repeatedly emphasized that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. He also said that “the rational mind with take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.”

Creative imagination allows us to see beyond the obvious, to shift our perception and explore new ways of seeing and doing something. The key to engaging the process seems to be staying in the present and being open to what wants to unfold. The moment we begin to evaluate our ideas we short-circuit are ability to be in the present. One of the most important techniques for exploring your creative urges is brainstorming, in which you allow the flow of creative associations to take you in many directions without judging which ideas are valuable and which are deadends. When you stay present as an objective observer to the flow of words on the page, the strokes of your paintbrush across the canvas, the thoughts and ideas as you problem solve at work, the sense of the right spices to use when you are cooking, then you keep open the connection to a bigger more expansive part of your mind or the mystery (it’s hard to say what is really being tapped into). When I teach writing I repeatedly remind students that “your imagination is smarter than you are.”

Neuroscientists have actually shown that when you let the stream of consciousness flow our brain is actually activating more neurons and brain cells. Give it a try the next time you have a problem to solve. Think about some accept 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.

Here’s one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver provides beautiful inspiration for embracing our creative imagination.

Spring Azures – Mary Oliver

In spring the blue azures bow again
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows —
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking —

don’t seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings —
blue ones —
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London
— a boy staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city —
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the imagination.

You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

- Franz Kafka

When we stop the chattering of our minds, which is usually busy rehashing the past or worrying about the future, and relax into the silence of the moment we can begin to hear the soft voice of Spirit, the source of our creativity and inspiration. Picasso said that when he entered his studio to paint he “took off his ego the same way the Muslim takes off his shoes before entering a Mosque”. He understood that in order to create, he needed to get his personality out of the way and let his Higher Self or Spirit work through him. This is true not only the more obvious forms of creativity, like writing, dance, or music, but for the whole of our lives. We have access through our intuition and our internal knowing to information that can help us to make the best decisions for ourselves and living a more fulfilling life.

Matthew Fox, the former Catholic Priest who was censured for espousing the doctrine of original sin, has written a beautiful book titled, Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet, where he suggests that when we are creative we become co-creators with creation. I clearly remember the first time in my writing when I got on a roll and knew I was writing something good. I paused and looked around the room, wondering “where is this coming from” because I knew it wasn’t coming from “me”. After a while I began to understand that I was tapping into an expanded state that I could access on a regular basis when I stopped thinking and let what wanted to come through me flow into the work.

In order to access our creativity and higher guidance we need to quiet our minds and learn listen to the more subtle messages of our body, heart and knowing that speak to us through intuition, our gut, our hunches that may not make any sense to our minds. As Matthew Fox said, “Creativity and imagination are not frosting on the cake: They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are the essence of who we are. They constitute our deepest empowerment.”

I refer to my writing classes and coaching collectively as The Heart of Writing. As a lover of double entendres (a phrase that can be understood in either of two ways), I feel this phrase captures both my intention to provide an experience of the heart or essence of the writing process but also my desire to convey the importance of writing from the heart and tapping its wisdom and depth.

So I find it especially interesting that scientists studying the heart have discovered that our heart (feelings) produces 5000 times more electromagnetic energy than our brain (thoughts). When we focus on our heart with the energy of love we draw on that current for what we want to manifest in our lives since, as physicists tell us, the space between atoms is composed of electromagnetic energy. It seems that the energy of the heart when focused can help us attract what we desire.

The Institute of HeartMath (www.heartmath.org) , a scientific research group studying the intelligence of the heart have discovered that intuition seems to be the language of the heart. Intuitive signals go first to the heart before being relayed to the brain and they have found that the heart senses the nature of particular events ahead of time, before these events actually occur. Joseph Chilton Pearce in his most recent book subtitled “A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart”, talks about this in detail. He goes on to discuss that intuition is something we share with other mammals. He tells the story of a group of elephants used for the tourist trade on a Malaysian beach hit by the Tsunami of December 2004. Several minutes before the wave hit the one elephant out with his handler and a tourist went racing away from the beach to the other elephants to help them pull up their tethers and run to high ground. The villagers who followed their loud trumpeting were spared.

When we are really being creative, in either our chosen art form or within our lives as a whole. We tap into a state of Grace, sometimes known as being in the zone or in the flow. I think the heart and intuition are involved in this sort of unconscious competence that the mind doesn’t really understand but is able to appreciate. Through practice and commitment we can learn to listen more carefully to the wisdom and intuitions of our heart and use them to focus in on what we really want to create in our lives and in the world.

I had the privilege of taking a workshop from noted American poet William Stafford not long before he died. Stafford wrote a poem a day for most of his adult life. He would rise at four in the morning, make his tea and toast, then sit on the sofa in the living room and write a poem. By the time his wife and children were up he felt as if he had done his day’s work. He would then go off to his job of teaching writing to at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He would give his students the assignment to write a poem a day. When they began to whine and moan that that was too difficult, he would respond “lower your standards”. By lowering his standards he was awarded the National Book Award; appointed U.S. Poet Laureate and Poet Laureate of Oregon; received a Guggenheim Fellowship; and was a beloved teacher and workshop leader. He kept a daily journal for 50 years, and composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published. Of his work he once said in an interview: “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.”

In order to show up for our creativity or the work of our life I think it helps to lower our standards on what we can accomplish on a daily basis while still keeping our focus on what we ultimately desire or want to achieve. Develop the practice of showing up everyday and taking some action, however small, toward your goal. If you are a writer be happy that you have drafted a poem or a page. You can start by showing up for 15 minutes rather than thinking you have to find two hours of free time before you begin. If you are moving toward a new career or expanding your work be happy that you have made one phone call to connect with someone you might be able to help you. By taking one small step a day you can cover a lot of ground and it has the added advantage of allowing you to sneak in under the radar of the part of you that is resistant to change. Carve moments out of your day for doing what brings you heart and meaning or gives you a sense of momentum. I carry copies of the poems or essays I am working on revising with me wherever I go and pull them out while I’m waiting to have my car’s oil changed or early for an appointment. By learning to do our creative work in the middle of things we infuse our daily life with the meaning and satisfaction that comes from nourishing our soul.

Recently I listened to noted futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard speak of the changes we are all noticing in our social systems and the Earth as a birth of something new. She went on to say that humans are the first species to be aware of their own potential for evolution and that through the power of human consciousness we have the capacity to influence our evolution. She thinks that one of the biggest shift we are making is a focus from living in our ego/mind to living from our essence/heart. From this place we can create a new world based on cooperation and work together to find creative solutions to the problems that we face.

The Institute of Heartmath, www.heartmath.org, a research group with affiliations to Stanford University has been studying the intelligence for the human heart for 20 years. They have discovered that focusing our attention in our heart while feeling the sense of appreciation or love actually reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and creates a sense of calm. When a group of people do this together they establish a field of coherence where everyone’s heart begins to beat at the same rate creating an energy of heart resonance that can then be focused from a distance on people and places in need in order to help create a sense of calm and peace.

Members of Heartmath have started The Global Coherence Initiative, “a science-based, project to unite people in heart-focused care and intention, to facilitate the shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace”. They have a website at www.glcoherence.org that includes virtual care rooms where people gather from all over the world to send heart energy to people and places in crisis like Japan.

In my work with writing and creativity I have long been aware of the importance of connecting to the heart as we work. Both in the context of finding subjects and themes that make our heart sing but also creating from the feeling place of the heart. As Robert Frost said, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” I always know that if I am moved in my own heart by a piece of writing or any other creative effort that the work will genuinely touch other people. All you have to do is center yourself in your heart as you work and listen to where it leads you. I think our heart gives us access to the heart of creation which inspires and informs our highest expressions of our creative self.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney

On a recent visit to Ireland, I was staying in Doolin, County Clare when I had the inspiration to catch a ride up to Fanore a village in the extraordinary limestone region known as the Burren where Irish poet, philosopher, former priest had been born and raised. John did much to awaken an modern interest in Celtic Spirituality and I was lucky enough to attend a workshop with him on the Celtic Imagination some years before.

I had seen on the website devoted to his work www.johnodonohue.com that John was buried in Creggagh graveyard, about two miles south of the village along the coast road, just beyond O’Donohue’s pub. I got out in front of the pub and walked down the road warmed by the rare February sunshine. Stepping into the graveyard I scanned the headstones and caught sight of a handmade wooden slab at the head of what looked like a small garden. It was the only site like that in the cemetery and sensed it must be John’s. On the front of the wooden headstone was a small handmade stone cross and a picture frame with a photo of John and an inscription that read John O’Donohue 1954 to 2008. . .and beyond. I burst out laughing because it so much caught the spirit of John and my sense that his big presence lives on still in his work and in the heart of all those who he touched. Next to his photo was a poem of his I’ve included below. Others had obviously visited the leaving letters in plastic bags, rosaries and flowers that had been placed amid the bed of living plants including primroses and a small shrub of camillia I left my gratitude for all the ways John has influenced by life and then walked back to village where I was staying across the gray limestone of the Burren that John loved and worked so hard to preserve.

Beannacht/Blessing

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

- John O’Donohue

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. – Martha Grahman

I think we can all feel the quickening in the world today and the call to awaken to living more fully from our sense of purpose and our unique gifts. I’ve written a lot about the power of creativity to help us learn to access a more expanded way of being in the world. It allows us to draw on our inner wisdom and knowing through inspiration, intuition and imagination to come up with innovative ideas and solutions to problems. Part of my own deep sense of purpose is to help ignite the creative fire in others not only in service to the world but also because being creative makes us feel alive. I love seeing the excitement my clients experience when they engage the creative process in whatever form calls to them. It’s a high energy state that allows us to think and feel at a higher frequency to access more of our potential. Creative expression can also be healing and help us understand the yearnings of our heart and soul.

I have been working with a creativity coaching client who is a visual artist, encouraging her to feel what wants to be drawn without censoring; to just let the paintbrush have a life of it’s own. This technique of working with the senses and feelings which is the language of the subconscious is useful for all forms of creativity. Using a combination of free drawing and free writing this client is having amazing healing revelations and shifts in her life. She is gaining personal and spiritual insights into healing a painful divorce and clarity the ways she wants to move forward in her life that feel right and alive. In allowing the creativity to flow she is surprising herself with the depth and quality of drawings that are coming forth. It reminds me of what Hemingway said, “For a long time now I have tried to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

Pablo Picasso spoke of talking his ego off at the door of his artist studio the way a Muslim takes his shoes off before entering a Mosque. He understood that in order to be creative he had to let Spirit entering into the process. Just as Michelangelo spoke of the sense of being guided on how to let the statue of David out of the marble. Creativity transforms us, makes us more of who we really are as we let the spark of divine inspiration guide us as we play with writing, drawing, cooking, designing a solar car or dancing around the living room. Play is a critical ingredient in being creative, it’s how we connect to the flow. There is a great sense of joy and satisfaction that comes from this.

Remember everyone is creative. It’s a part of being human. Since we live in a culture that doesn’t honor creativity and imagination most of us need to reclaim this part of ourselves. Try this. Do a ten minute free write asking your creative spirit what she needs from you right now and you can also write about what you need from your creative spirit.

Creativity coaches Robert & Michelle Colt who specialize in working with actors to achieve success in their careers think of learning and mastery as a four stage process. How quickly you move through this process depends on two key factors: How you focus your mind and trusting your non-conscious mind. I think that this is applicable to all forms of creativity including writing. I’ve summarized the essence of the four stages below:

1) The first stage is called unconscious incompetence. This is the stage where you don’t know that you don’t know. You will often be focused on the reasons things seem like a struggle.

2) The second stage is called conscious incompetence. This is the stage where you know that you don’t know. You will be catch glimpses of problems you are have with your work. This stage is often met with the Ah ha.

3) The third stage is called conscious competence. In this stage you now know that you know. This is the stage of conscious effort where you attempt to find solutions to the problems you recognize. This stage can feel like two steps forward and one step back.

4) The final stage is called unconscious competence. This is the stage of mastery. It is a state of Grace, sometimes known as being in the zone or in the flow. When I tap this place I feel almost like I am taking celestial dictate and the story writes itself. This is where great works of literature come from. All great writers are unconsciously competent in their craft. Getting to this stage involves practice and commitment. Understanding the power of your unconscious mind can certainly help.

Several years ago I attended a week long retreat in a canyon on Navajo land in Arizona with poetry therapist John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine and Finding What You Didn’t Lose. The trip was part of a longer personal journey to connect more deeply with the yearnings of my soul and to live and write from a deeper more authentic place. The combination of camping in the desert mixed with gathering in the safe and sacred space of a group using poetry, not in the traditional literary sense, but as a vehicle for healing had a profound effect. Grief I had been holding for decades from the loss of my mother when I was a teenager came to the surface to be healed. The deepest healing came as I wrote the following poem:

Mothered

At sixteen I bought my first bird book,
a small green hardback, whose binding I broke
turning countless times its pages of color,
striking orange and black of oriole,
the azure sea shade of bluebird, red ember
iridescence of hummingbird’s throat,
fluttering in my hands for nearly forty years.

The year birds entered my life was
the same year my mother left it.
The woman who carried my brother and me
deep into Nature. Camping under the sun
drizzled scent of redwoods, wandering
wave tossed tidepools at ocean’s edge.

She’d pack the blue 54 Ford station wagon
every summer, to journey into wildness,
the expanses of the American West
to take in its beauty, as if through skin.
Laying our young and tender bodies
on the land, connecting us thread
by invisible thread to the earth’s intricate web.

So when her heart suddenly stopped
that summer, I was away at biology camp
discovering birds, and she slipped from the world
long before I wanted to let her go. I remained
tethered to the Earth, cradled by the great mother,
and birds became messengers
dropping from the heavens
to lift my spirits on a thousand wings,
embracing me with their songs.

- Suzanne Murray

The first few drafts of the poem I wrote through tears and beyond helping to clear the archival grief I was carrying there was a great healing from being able to honor my mother for the gift she gave me in connecting me to Nature. Everyone on the trip whether they were skilled in the craft of poetry or not had a similar healing as we gathered together to witness each others words and experiences and share poems, both our own and the work of poets like Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, Rumi, Hafiz, Naomi Shihab Nye and William Stafford who touch the human heart.

Like other forms of sacred writings, poetry is the language of the soul interfacing with a greater source of inspiration so that a good poem can stir us in ways our conscious mind may not always be aware of. We can feel the poem in our own body and soul and sense the power of the words taking us deeper into what really matters. Reading and writing poems certainly helps to anchor me in these changing times and it can inspired other forms of creativity as well.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to the Young Poet

Years ago I attended a writer’s conference with William Kittridge who had taught creative writing at the University of Montana for thirty years. He spoke of how at the start of his teaching career he focused on working with the elements of craft but as the years progressed he found what was most helpful was to ask his students the question, “why do you want to write?”. I started using this question in my writing class and discovered that it leads people to the essence of their desire to write which provides a lot of energy for engaging the process.

Later I started seeing the power of asking questions in every area of my life. Asking questions invites the subconscious mind, which represents an estimated 93% of your mind, into the game. Once you give your subconscious mind a question to work on or a problem to solve it will work on it 24/7 to come up with a solution. I’m sure you have all had the experience of sitting at your desk trying to figure something out with your conscious, rational mind. Then you give up, get in your car, drive home and as you are pulling into your driveway the answer pops into your head. With your conscious mind busy driving your subconscious was able to draw on it’s vast tracts of information and insight and reach the surface of your mind with a solution. That’s why we often do our best “thinking” when our conscious mind is occupied with a mundane task: like walking, driving, doing the dishes, or taking a shower.

The beauty of questions is that they open up a world of possibilities. Thinking that there is only one answer or leaping to a conclusion is limiting. In creativity as in life it works best to play in the field of “all is possible” with questions like “What if there was another way to do this?” or “What’s the best way for solve this problem?”.’

When I teach classes or work with coaching clients I’ll ask “What are your questions?, What are the questions you need to ask to understand what wants to born in your writing, in your creativity, in your life?” I often use freewriting, where you write without thinking, as a tool for answering the questions I have for myself. Writing is the best tool I know of getting clear on the questions and then accessing an expanded inner wisdom and knowing. Sometimes when I’m struggling with something, I sit down and write the question, “What do I need to know right now?”. Inviting more questions. Opening to the possibilities.

Here’s a short anecdotal story to captures the generosity of the Irish people and their openness to help strangers.

I was traveling with a small group. We were waiting to catch the ferry from Doolin out to the Aran Islands. When the boat came into sight I realized that I had left my boots back at the hostel. I checked the ferry schedule and saw that there was another boat in two hours. My companions agreed that it would be okay to wait while I retrieved my shoes. I set off on foot intending to hitchhike the mile back to the hostel if I could. I had walked just a bit beyond the parking lot when a little blue Toyota pulls up beside be and the man driving says, “Get in, we’re going to get your boots, a little birdie told me”. The others would later explain that the man who ran the little coffee stand we had been sitting in front of and his friend noticed me leave and asked, “where is she going”. When they heard, the man in the stand says to his friend, “you watch the stand” and his friend says to my companions, “you watch my dog” handing one of them the leash as he ran to his car. We raced along the narrow lane up through the village, I retrieved by boots and we made it back in time to catch the ferry. . .

I was deeply grateful and the man didn’t think a things of helping out in that way. I have had many similar experiences in my travels throughout Ireland.

Talking to paper is talking to the divine. It is talking to an ear that will understand even the most difficult things. Paper is infinitely patient. – Burghild Nina Holzer

Each new year’s day feels like a chance to begin anew. This year I think we can all feel the call to live more authentically from our deeper yearnings and desires and bring our gifts into the world. I wanted to offer you a tool for gaining clarity and insights from our heart’s deeper way of knowing that is the surest and fastest way I know. It’s faster than meditating, going for a walk to think things through or talking to a friend. It involves using writing as a hotline to your truest knowing.

I first started keeping a journal in college and have maintained that practice for over thirty five years. Later as I became interested in creative writing I learned a technique called freewiting from a book by Peter Elbow called Writing Without Teacher. It involves writing without thinking for a set amount of time where you let the writing take you where it wants to go. This differs from journaling in that it involves an act of surrender and letting go of needing to figure it out with your conscious mind. In allowing words to flow onto paper as they emerge from your inner being in a spontaneous and heartfelt way you access a profound clarity and wisdom.

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. To tap your inner knowing you can address your Higher Self or the source of the highest wisdom you can access with a question like “what do I need to know right now?” or “what is my deepest heart’s desire” and then just let the pen take over. If you are really fast on the keyboard you can try it on the computer. When you are finished read it over as if it is a letter you have gotten in the mail. Pretend someone other than you wrote it. Be open and curious. You may also want to put it away for a couple of days and read it again. This allows you to be much more objective. Be persistent. It can take a while to develop the ability and connection.

Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue once observed that the Greek word for “beauty” is the same word for “calling”, and that a defining quality of beauty is that we feel more alive in its presence. Yosemite is a place of such power and profound beauty that we can’t help but feel awe and wonder in it’s presence and feel uplifted. Writers, painters and photographers have been drawing on this inspiration for decades.

I have had to good fortune to have a close relationship with Yosemite throughout my life beginning from the time I was a baby and my mother who had a great love of Nature took my brother and me camping there. As a teenager I began backpacking in the high country of Yosemite and then out of college I lived for two years in the Valley where I worked teaching natural science for Yosemite Institute. During my early years in Yosemite I was especially inspired by John Muir, (1838 to 1914), the Scottish born American naturalist, author and early advocate of wilderness preservation, who helped establish Yosemite National Park. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in the Sierra Nevada have touched millions. Here are some of my favorite quotes of his that really convey the sense of aliveness and inspiration that such beauty and connecting to Nature can bring.

As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

And here’s a poem of mine inspired by both Yosemite and John Muir about birds that dwell along the mountain streams.

Water Ouzels

Lilting voices flood
fast mountain streams.
Fly on furious wings

behind rushing cascades,
below the rippled surface
bobbing for bugs.

John Muir called them
hummingbirds of waterfalls,
they edge his sacred streams,

skimming bubbling waves
of tumbling water,
little gray dancers

haunt river rocks on bending
knees, genuflecting to a God
everywhere and nowhere.

- Suzanne Murray

My father was born in San Francisco two years after my grandparents arrived from Ireland and he grew up in an all Irish neighborhood. Yet I never thought of him as being Irish. He was part of a generation that wanted to be American and assimilate. It wasn’t until I went to Ireland for the first time and saw my father everywhere that I realized how Irish he really had been and how many Irish traits he passed on to me; the wry sense of humor, the keen sense of irony, the kindness and generosity, the tendancy to come at everything indirectly and the ability to hold a grudge. I also got my father’s love of story and poetry and well as a interest in learning. I have been back many times, stayed in cousins in County Kilkenny and County Mayo, and fallen in love with the place and the people.

Whenever I’m in Ireland I can feel the presence of the ancestors in the land. Especially in the West, in County Mayo where my grandfather came from a deep emotion rose in me as I visited the place where he had been born. In reclaiming my Irish heritage I feel I have helped in healing my lineage.

There are seventy million people of Irish ancestry living outside Ireland mostly in the U.S. and Australia. Yet in the Irish language there is no word for emigrant. The closest word for leaving the homeland is exile. The songs about Irish who had to leave are filled with a haunting sense of lament. The Irish, who are actually the indigenous people of the island, are said to have an almost umbilical connection to the land. If you have any Irish blood I think you might be interested in exploring your roots and learning about the rich, complex history of the Ireland.

You don’t have actually go to Ireland to learn more about your ancestors. You can learn a lot on line. The Mormon Church maintains a comprehensive geneaology database that is free and not church related at www.familysearch.org. Also most libraries subscribe to online databases that do charge a fee like www.ancestry.com. If your ancestors came through Ellis Island you can find out what ship they sailed on and where it came from at www.ellisisland.org.

Amazing Peace

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

- Maya Angelou

Recently Judith Rousseau who came on the west of Ireland trip I lead this past September sent me a card where she so beautiful expressed the power of pilgrimage or traveling with the intention to learn and grow to the deeper rhythms of our soul can effect us in profound ways that we only become conscious of over time. I was deeply touch by her words because they allowed me to understand that what people take home from the experience may be far more than I imagined.

Judith describes the three trips: “the one you plan and dream of; the one you have unfolding in the time it took; and the one you remember. But still, the trip is all three intertwined.” She went on to say “It took about a month but finally memories of little hardships, disappointments, thought of what I should have done drained away and the essence of the journey rose up like a face in the water – palimpsest: seeing what’s beneath the mind’s blather. I remember the details of the trip with shocking clarity. I still don’t know what it means – to me – I have a feeling there will be a seeping out for years to come.”

I have been carrying Judith’s card around with me and rereading it over and over because I feel like she really captures the depth and power that pilgrimages to sacred places can bring to our lives. And I feel a sense of awe that I could be part of this process for another.

Here’s a deeply moving and inspiring poem by Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (1956 to 2008) who had a great grasp of fertile quality of imagination found in Celtic Wisdom. He wrote so beautifully about in his book Anam Cara.

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

~ John O’Donohue ~

(From To Bless the Space Between Us)

The act of showing up to writing as a daily practice has enrich my life in countless ways. As Annie Lamott says in the introduction to her book bird by bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “Writing has so much to give, so much to reach so many surprises. That thing you have to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part.” I agree completely. Through my writing practice I understand more about how I think and how I see of the world; I more readily see the value and meaning of my life as I gain deeper insight to the stories and ideas that are important to me; and I strengthen my ability to tap the inspiration, intuition and imagination of the creative spirit not only in my writing but the rest of my life. This awareness and approach has allowed me to fall in love with the process which after three decades remains fresh and in my willingness to play with the process I have been able to finely hone the craft of writing as well.

Some years ago I did a workshop with John Fox, author of Finding What You Didn’t Lose and Poetic Medicine, who works with poetry for the purpose of healing. In his groups the focus is on drawing inspiration from poetry and writing poems of self expression and healing without worrying about needing to master the form. In our changing times I have more and more been thinking about the wisdom and healing power contained in poems. Recently someone I know was getting ready to sell the home and land where she had lived and loved for thirty years. I had suggested that she write about it as a way to express her feelings and come to a sense of peace with the decision. She wrote a beautiful tribute and love poem to the land and gardens she had so carefully tended. I then had the urge to send her Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods which carries in it a powerful message on what it means to let go.

At that point I had the sense that finding the right poem that speaks to what we are going through can hold us in a place of comfort, healing and deeper understanding of a challenge or difficulty in our life. It can be like writing a prescription for yourself knowing that words can heal.

If you are new to poetry and not accustomed to reading it then start with the highly accessible poets like the Sufi mystic poets like Rumi or Hafiz or best selling contemporary poets like Mary Oliver or Billy Collins. Below are a couple of ones that are a good place to begin. Or try writing your own poem. Be willing to relax and play with it.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means

-Billy Collins

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattail
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

I think German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was probably the greatest spiritual poet of the 20th century. Here’s one of my favorites.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly)

For The Time Of Necessary Decision

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing
nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

- John O’Donohue

I always think of poetry as written by the soul of the writer for the soul of the reader so when I read poems I let them wash over me and feel into them as I read. Favorite poems remind me of what is really important to me. Here are some that speak to my soul.

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wants to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look or if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that all.
My hair will grow gray in any case,
,my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all the usual changes.
If my face is to be weatherbeaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

-Fleur Adock

Ripening Barberries

Already the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
the man who is not rich now that summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision inside,
simply waiting for nighttime
to rise all around him in darkness -
it’s all over for him, he’s like an old man.

Nothing else will come: no more doors will open
and everything that does have will cheat him
even You, my God. And You are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

- Wendell Berry

Landscape

Isn’t it plain that the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they want

about spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors to my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning so far I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky – as though

all night they have thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

- Mary Oliver

The difference between a journey and a pilgrimage is that on a pilgrimage every step counts. – Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage

Ever since I first felt the pull of my Irish ancestors, trips to Ireland always have the quality of a pilgrimage where I let my heart and intuition lead me to visit the places and meet the people that have the ability to expand my sense of myself and my place in the world. I don’t think we have to travel half way around the world for this experience. I do think we need to slow down and pay closer attention to the world around us and our own inner yearnings and callings. You could do this on a day trip to somewhere you’ve never been before or to a favorite place with the intention of seeing it through new eyes and having new experiences. Our souls love newness and change. It’s why simply going away for the weekend can leave us feeling restored.

Writing, or any practice of creative expression, can be it’s own sort of pilgrimage where we are surprised along the way as we explore our creative imagination and inner realms. I always love it when in my writing something pops out of my pen and I think “wow, that’s really interesting, I didn’t know I thought that.” I’ve found in writing  and traveling it’s best to view the journey itself as it’s own reward and be open to what the world has to say to you through the people you meet, the inspired thoughts you have, and intuitions on where to go and what to do.

The following poem by Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, which is one of my all time favorites, captures the quality of how an ordinary experience can become extraordinary by looking more carefully at the world and letting our imaginations play.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

Generally when I travel on my own in Ireland I don’t book ahead. I let my intuition lead me. If it’s a place I’ve never been I will study the guidebook and see what pulls at me. After my first night in Dublin to recover from jet lag. I felt lead to hop the bus to the town of Cashel which is dominated by the Rock of Cashel a monastic site and seat of power for the region dating back a 1000 years. On the tallest hill amid the rocky landscape are a clutter of buildings, including the a round tower, the ruins of an abbey and a beautiful 12th century chapel all surrounded by a stone wall. What amazed me the most was the spectacular view afforded to the mountain to the west in County Kerry.

But as Petrina the woman who runs the Cashel Holiday Hostel said to me when I booked in on arriving, “I tell people who are all concerned with going from site to site, like from the Blarney Stone to the Rock of Cashel here, that when their travles are over it’s the people that they met along the way that they will remember”. And I couldn’t have agreed more. In true Irish fashion, Petrina was happy to talk to have a conversation, to find out more about you, to answer any questions you might have. She sent me to O’Dwyers Butcher Shop for the best Brown Soda Bread in town. She invited me to take her dog, Millie, for a walk if I wanted some company. She came knocking on my door one evening insisting that I join her up at the local church for a free concert of Irish music by a group that was really good. All in all she made me feel wonderfully at home and that is what I will remember most about my time in Cashel.

I’ve been reading an interesting book, titled Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within by Janet Conner. It focuses on how writing can help you access your inner wisdom and deeper ways of knowing. Anyone who establishes a writing practice, whether for creative expression or self discovery, begins to realize they can tap expanded ways of knowing and gain insights beyond the reach of their everyday state of awareness. I found the ideas and wisdom found in the book are very much applicable to creative writing.

In the book the author interviewed creativity consultants Michelle and Robert Colt who have studied what goes on in the brain when we write. They first describe the four types of brain waves, “Beta, the fastest is associated with stress, work and concentration.” Most of us spend the bulk of our waking time here. Alpha waves are a bit slower and are “associated with creativity, calmness, and insight.” This is the brain state of “being in the zone” where your work feels effortless. Theta waves are the next slowest. We experience this state when we first wake up or have an ah..ha moment where you have a really creative idea or the solution to a problem pops into your mind. People who meditate slip into theta quickly and remain there through the period of meditation.. Delta waves, that we experience in deep sleep are the slowest.

When we write we start out in beta, but very quickly move into alpha and eventually theta. The Colts explain that , “any moment of intense creativity is a theta burst. And when you engage in deep dialogue with divine mind, you are having mystical theta bursts” In the state of mystical theta bursts you are surprised by what comes out of your pen (or keyboard). I remember when I had my first experience of this state. I stopped writing to look around the room to see where the words were coming from because they didn’t feel like they were coming from me. It sounds strange but it actually feels delightful and it’s really were the best writing comes from.

I was really excited to read about the brain states because it explained what I have been teaching intuitively for years. I tell my students to never wait for inspiration before sitting down to write because if you do you will likely be waiting a long time. I explain that you often have to write a half a page or a page where not much is happening, where you will feel sluggish and resistant before you start to feel a sense of the creative flow. I now realize that you are actually writing your way out of beta down into the brain states that give you access to the more creative states. It’s why establishing writing as a habit or practice is so important because you never really feel like writing until you slip into the more creative brain states and the best way to get there is to sit down and start writing.

The information about brain states also explains why we have hard time coming up with creative solutions to life’s and the world’s problems when we are in our everyday (beta) mind. This reminds me of what Einstein meant when he said, Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. Reading about the brain states makes me aware of how important it is when I am faced with a problem to slow down and calm down knowing this will help me tap the more expanded brain states and allow creative solutions and new ideas to surface.

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.