The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence. John O’Donohue
It’s a cause of relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, full independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.** Oliver Burkeman
I write these posts because I believe you have so much to bring, And I want to encourage you to bring it.
I also write the posts to encourage myself, I know that if I don’t give my ideas some tangible form I am not being present but absent, And when I notice this I get cranky. See O’Donohue and Godin, They know, they understand:
It often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, to create beauty.*
Mortals must do what they are here to create or they will become cranky.^
This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. … Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.* Carlos Casteneda
If your plan, your idea or your art doesn’t involve any significant hurdles in moving forward, it’s probably not worth that much. If it were easy, everyone would do it. The tactic is to seek a path where you see and understand the significant hurdles that kept others away. And then dance with them. They’re not a problem, they’re a feature.** Seth Godin
Don’t believe your path with a heart will be easy, Or pleasurable. Significant, Meaningful, Transformational will become more important.
May you know your heart and understand it, so that you may follow wherever it leads.
It’s about understanding not only the works, but the world we live in and the times we live in and being a kind of mirror of that. I think it happens really naturally and inevitably if your are honest with yourself and your times.* Keith Haring
What year is in your imagination?** Lynda Barry
Wanted: More people willing to be as open as possible for as long as possible towards as many things and as many people as possible.
It’s so hard, Taking up so much energy – Literally burning calories of energy – And even if we could do it perfectly – And we can’t – Our life isn’t long enough to be open to everything.
But, when we try, something is happening inside of us and we are changing. See John O’Donohue:
As always in the world of the mind, recognition is a huge transformative force.^
Here is the pressure of reality needing to be met with the power of imagination, Something I often find myself contemplating.
Imagination need reality, Reality needs imagination.
Being open to reality, To what it is, Grows, Improves, Our imaginations –
Does your imagination know what year it is?** –
The more open we are, the more we have to work with: More people and more ideas and more places and more things.
As Alan Jacob worries:
the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.^^
Perhaps we’ll never be able to imagine what we really want to if we remain where we are, In our smaller worlds, When we live in such a big Big BIG world.
The Celts understood that all beginning risks the unknown; a blessing was intended to be a shelter of light around the pilgrim and the place.* John O’Donohue
You’re still here, Imagination somewhat battered but basically intact, Now reaching deeper to connect with your special abilities, and, Raising yourself up, You continue to pursue your first avowed intent.
And so, Being the alchemist you are, May good and beauty come from that which has been bad for you, Or difficult, Or painful.
If you can do it once, you might be able to do it ten times. And if you do it ten times, it will become a skill and a practice. You’ll do it more naturally and more often. … Ten reps is a great place to begin. Seth Godin
Chance favours the prepared mind.* Louis Pasteur
What is a dream, a hope a desire without a practice to contain it?
Whilst some people are all container and no content, Others are all dissipating contents and no container. The sweet spot is to shape a routine that is also a ritual, One that is alive and playful:
The dream of prayer and art is to be nearer, even to slip through to dwell for a while in the vicinity of the essence.^
Absolutism is a form of hiding. Perfect is the enemy of good.* Seth Godin
An inner alignment starts to develop that can release extraordinary energy and creativity, qualities previously dissipated by denial, inner contradiction, and unawareness of the situation and oneself.** Peter Senge
We are creatures of desire. Without desire, it is as if we do not exist.
Yes, there are very real problems in over-desiring, Taking us into chaos and even destruction, But there can be greater issues with denial, With hiding … The proverbial light under a bushel: Isn’t god more concerned with denial than with desire?
May you bring your wonderfully quirky, beautiful and useful thing into the world.
And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rear-view mirror, will be the one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: to how many people you helped, or how much you got don; but the working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite talents, you actually got round to doing – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing – whatever magnificent task or weird little things it was you came here for.^
It’s hard work, and it’s been hard for everyone all along. There’s good reason to believe this, apart from the fact that it’s true. If you think that writing – the act of composition – should flow, and it doesn’t, what are you likely to feel? Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid. The idea that writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.** Verlyn Klinkenborg
I have decided to make Keith Haring Journals my main read for this month. I bought the book back in November and had slowly read to page 49. It is time to dive in.
As I read Keith Haring’s descriptions of his experimental drawing and painting, I am struck by the thought that no-one needs permission to produce their art. You and me, We only need begin our art, Or artisanship, And one thing will lead to another.
That last sentence hides a world of struggle, Inspiration and failure, Learning and perseverance, and there is art produced within the art – You:
An inner alignment starts to develop that can release extraordinary energy and creativity, qualities previously dissipated by denial, inner contradiction, and unawareness of the situation and oneself.^
[W]e too are always falling … spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.* Robin Wall Kimmerer
We’re not very good at predicting the future. … it might be worth asking “and then what happens,” five times. Five steps from here to there … If any of the steps involve, “and then a miracle happens,” or “we’ll deal with that later,” it might be worth taking a few more moments to reconsider the first step.** Seth Godin
Robert Wall Kimmerer tells the Native American creation story, Of Skywoman falling to a watery world with a handful of seeds, Being saved from the waters by the creatures who would fashion a place for her to live with soil reclaimed from beneath the waters, Fashioned as land on the back of a turtle.
Here Richard Powers ponders how far we have come And what we are capable of:
I barely registered the landmark that life on Earth had just passed: A few self-replicating molecules, after four billion years of random walks shaped by nothing more than trial and error, had learned how to measure the infinitesimal dimming of light from trillions of miles away with enough precision to infer the transits of minuscule invisible planets passing in front of their obliterating stars – it was like detecting a fly walking across a streetlight in a distant city.^
It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that life residing precariously on the back of a turtle is best explored through humility, gratitude and faithfulness, Rather than through pride, greed and foolishness. Especially when we remain so bad at looking forward, Whilst seeing our mess so perfectly well looking backwards.
We can be glad for where we have landed with seeds in our hands, Our decent’s result could have been far worse … And every day is a new place of landing.
Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood. We are rhythm machines, that’s what we are.* Mickey Hart
Life-balance is a part of rhythm, Rhythm is a bigger experience than balance, Yet through different schools, especially the school of life, We have lost our rhythm, Or been unable to find it.
M. C. Richards points us towards the gift we want to bring into the world, The product of our rhythm, Rhythm that is creative freedom:
My hunger for freedom is my hunger for myself, for my creative initiative.**
This is our crystallising intent for which we must dive deeply, Opening mind, heart and will, Yet these are strange words to us, Unknown, unlearned:
It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future … but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away. Turn it the other way and your release resources and give people back to themselves.^
These words are those of educational reformer Ken Robinson who offers three helpful steps to teach into the rhythm of our creativity, Providing us with three self-steps:
There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.^
By encouragement I mean to be open to the encouraging that there is more to learn about yourself, To let your barriers and resistances fall. By identifying I mean to pay attention to all of the more about you includes, To be willing to take the time to discover. By fostering I mean to make experimental spaces, To explore and to develop.
Unschool and unlearning is not about forgetting all we have learned so far but to treat it differently, more adeptly, In a way that doesn’t throw us off-balance or set us into an arhythmic spin:
re-examine all you’ve been told at school or church or in any book; dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines^^.
Pursuing art is not just a matter of finding the time – it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.* Stella Bowen
A creative person. Initiating, enacting. Using his lifetime to find his original face, to awaken his own voice, beyond all learning, habit, thought. When the human community finally knows itself, it will discover that it lives at the centre. Men will be artists in their life and labour.** M. C. Richards
Humility takes you to our inner being and secret heart – Not to be less than others but so you might be more of your self, A place not of confinement but of unknown, Even endless, possibility, Unfettered by the need to be like others, Free to be who only you can be, In this moment that only you may live:
Everyone seems to have forgotten that to live wonder-smitten by reality and be enchanted by the possible is not the stuff of science fiction but the core of our humanity.^
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