When I’m drawing I feel a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter when pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to light, or bees constructing their cells.*
John Berger

And I feel like an imposter often. That’s because my best work involves doing things I’ve never done before.**
Seth Godin

In my university work, I meet many people who feel themselves to be imposters.

I am one of them.

Anne Lamott helpful confesses:

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy.^

Which end of the sentence struck you most powerfully?

For me, it’s the joy end, the flip-side of imposterism.

I can focus on not being like everyone around me, or explore how the very point is not to be like everyone else, and to bring my best self into a new situation.

This is the purpose of our story:

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words – in short, what we call transcendence.^^

One more thought: on one occasion, Jesus’ disciples asked him who was the greatest:

He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.*^

At first it looked like the child was the imposter, but it turned out to be the other way around: the imposter shows the way.

What’s you’re equivalent of John Berger’s drawing experience?

Do it.

*From John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook;
**From Seth Godin’s The Practice;
^Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Anne Lamott on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Relationship Between Brokenness and Joy;
^^From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey;
*^Matthew 18:1-5.

A beautiful life is a planted life, attached but dynamic. A good life is a symbiotic life – serving others wholeheartedly and being served wholeheartedly in return. It is daily acts of loving-kindness, gentleness in reproach, forbearance after insult.*
David Brooks.

Look around.

Not at the objects surrounding you, but the people those objects represent.

Even posting this blog depends on so many who have made their expertise available to me.

It’s a kind of partnership and a day is full of them.

Corita Kent suggests for a drawing exercise to draw the spaces around a chair rather than the hard elements of the object itself.** From these there appears a chair. So, too, for us: as we notice those who are “partnering” with us through the day, we see something of our day and its activities emerging.

More in the foreground, we notice the partnerships we seek to forge through service, through servanthood, servants of one another.

Here are three words that move us deeper into providing others with the valuable imagination and creativity we bring: service, servanthood, servants.

Life is about seeking how far we are prepared to go: offering service, seeing ourselves being involved in servanthood, being most essentially servants.

It was a human face in my oblivion
A human being and a human voice
That cried to me, Come back, come back, come back.
But I would not. I said I would not come back.

It was so sweet in my oblivion
There was a sweet mist wrapped me round about
And I trod in a sweet and milky sea, knee deep,
That was so pretty and so beautiful, growing deeper.

But still the voice cried out, Come back, come back,
Come back to me from sweet oblivion!
It was a human and related voice
That cried to me in pain. So I turned back.

I cannot help but like Oblivion better
Than being a human heart and human creature,
But I can wait for her, her gentle mist
And those sweet seas that deepen are my destiny
And must come even if not soon.^

*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain;
**See Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart;
^Stevie Smith‘s Oblivion, quoted in Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files: Issue 157.

The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealised, unutilised potential in yourself.*
Joseph Campbell

You have the right to remain silent. But I hope you won’t. The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t without our permission.**
Seth Godin

Ready to play a game of “search, ask and knock”?

We take things too seriously when we play by the rules of society regarding who is beautiful, imaginative, the right age, valuable … . This game makes it possible to move beyond these and discover our uniqueness:

When we give names to things, we often assume that everything that goes by that name is alike^

Let us bring what have to bring without excuse or embarressment, because we’ll likely find that the game opens up with something to be found by those who search, with an answer for those who ask, and an opening for those who knock.

In other words, man should only play with beauty, and he should play only with beauty.^^

*From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey;
**From Seth Godin’s The Practice;
^Corita Kent, from Corita Ken and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart;
^^From Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Art is what we call it when we are able to create something new that changes someone.*
Seth Godin

[O]ur society does not teach us how to be an effective giver of gifts. The schools don’t emphasise it. The popular culture is confused about it.**
David Brooks

Whenever we bring our imagination to bear on reality, there’s the possibility of something creative happening for the good of another: in other words, art.

My wife and I have had two conversations with carers today: a friend who loves the work of caring for people at the beginning and end of the day, but who wouldn’t be drawn to it for the terrible pay: we ended up talking about how carers need to be valued as a third level of healthcare, with doctors and nurses.

The other remarked that she was “just a carer,” and needed to know that we believe caring to be skilled and valuable work.

Whatever we do in life, we need to bring our imagination to it.

*From Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters to what lies within us.*
Henry Stanley Haskins

By heart I mean the place where emotions meet reason, mobilise the will, and shape identity.**
Alex McManus

There are tens of thousands of decisions to be made every day. Some are very small, whilst others have a size about them that will take us towards or away from the person we ca be and the things we are capable of doing.

Perhaps the most critical are those we make at the very beginning of a day, the ones we have wrapped in habits that align us to our most important hopes and dreams.

These also form a space in which we are able to find recovery from our bad decisions.

*Henry Stanley Haskins, quoted in Sunil Raheja’s Dancing with Wisdom;
**From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.

A counter-offensive on our social emphasis on feeling good and looking good at the expense of living good.*
Kirk Strosahl

Or perhaps it’s not the software or the hardware that needs tuning. Perhaps it’s our attitude, our approach to work, the way we deal with possibility…**
Seth Godin

I’m a spring and summer person.

I am suspicious of autumn, knowing that it’s trying to hide winter from me.

It’s not that I hate winter, but I am nevertheless arrested by Katherine May’s words:

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.^

I can’t change or avoid winter but I am able to change rather than avoid my attitude: I have the capacity to make a space for it in my life.

Who knows what might happen.

Maybe I’ll even start on that second book I have a mind to write and doodle.

When we make space through compassion and understanding for the more difficult things in life as well as those we welcome, life can open up in the ways we want it to.

Kirk Strosahl adds:

If we are pursuing what we want to in life we’re not going to be experiencing mental health problems.*

It’s a bold statement, but it aligns with the truth that trauma separates us from the things we really want to do, and we must reconnect with what is most important to us – so that we regain our integrity or oneness, our singleness.

As I’ve suggested on many occasions, journaling can be a way for us to retune ourselves to what matters most:

Julia Cameron’s morning pages help unlock something inside. Not the muse or a magical mystical power, but simply the truth of your chosen identity. If you can do something creative each day, you’re now a creative person. Not a blocked person, not a striving person, not an untalented person. A creative person.^^

*Kirk Strosahl, from Psychwire’s course: ACT as Brief Intervention;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Do you have a tuner;
^From Katherine May’s Wintering;
^^From Seth Godin’s The Practice.

An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism.*
David Brooks

Martha Beck writes about the way of integrity we need to find our way back to: that is, our intactness.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes about “singleness,” becoming one with our imaginal self: the fullness of the person we can be.

Integrity and singleness are about finding our way home.

They are not alone in bearing witness to the existence of a path that leads us from our present to a different future, a path that contemporary society doesn’t feel it needs to inform us about (not least because it cannot place a value on it), a way that is not continuation or extension, but is transformative, and this over and over.

When we find our own path – we cannot walk another’s – we will also find our guides and become guides to others who will find us.

This is possible because, whilst each path is unique, they contain elements that are found in all.

We are the product of a highly individualistic society and may baulk at the idea of being guided, David Brooks warns and exhorts when he writes:

A hyper individualist sees the individual as a self-sufficient unit; the relationist says, a person is a node in a network, a personality in a movement toward others.*

The true guide understands that the person who will know your way best of all is you, and they will aim to help you to trust what emerges from your heart; they also know that you will have things to share with them that will help them on their own path: it’s two-way.

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.**

*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

“Connais-toi pour t’ameliorer” (“Know yourself to improve yourself”).*
Alain de Botton

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved.**
Corita Kent

We give up on our potential long before it gives up on us.

Let us fill our hearts with good and hopeful and generous words from many places and many people every day.

May we wrap these in a daily practice of our own invention and be open to see what emerges in thousands of new actions and words.

What if we made this our exploration for the upcoming new year?

*From Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists;
**From Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart.

good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls – and yet which we are most inclined to forget, event though they are the basis for our capacity for contentment and virtue*
Alain de Botton

Though so much else is in motion in the mind and the senses the hidden heart never loses sight of us. If we can ever feel lost or overwhelmed, all we have to do is become still and listen ins to our heart and we will soon find exactly where we are.**
John O’Donohue

There’s a story about the Older Testament prophet Elijah, who, having lost direction and forgetting what he had to do, wanders his way to the mountain of God and hides in a cave.

God finds Elijah there and promises to be present to the struggling messenger.

There ensues an earthquake, storm-wind, and fire, but he doesn’t recognise God in any of these.

Then follows a sheer, or thin, silence and when the prophet exits the cave there’s God waiting to recommission him.

We all lose our way, but when we’re tempted to want something dramatic to find our bearings and what it is we must do, the best way is to remember to fall into silence so that we might hear the beating of our own heart.

It is about discovering and living all that we are intended to be, with awe and wonder.^

*From Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;

^From Sunil Raheja’s Dancing with Wisdom.

When you lead without compensation, sacrifice without guarantees, when you take risks because you believe, then you are demonstrating your faith in the tribe and its mission.*
Seth Godin

All you have is what you are and what you give.**
“Shevek”

You are enough.

Attach this to faith and you will begin.

I’m saying this to myself, but you’re welcome to borrow it.

*From Seth Godin’s Tribes;
**Ursula Le Guin’s character Shevek, quoted in Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain.