Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
This morning I set aside my worry, ambition and anxiety and put on Van Morrison pleading See Me Through to begin time to play. The usefulness of having something as mundane as a routine is common knowledge, and sometimes the only way to regain footing; people often miss the fact that routine is integral to the creative process. Today I am reminding myself. Creativity requires structure. This last month my mind has been tumbling with the push of the world as well as my aims to finish my online class, complete work for exhibitions, develop in-person classes, painting, writing and keeping a garden alive in 100 degree heat. So what gets left out of my routine? The most important part— (besides dreams, prayer and meditation)— play.
Play is always a matter of context. It is not what we do but how we do it.
— Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play
Habit of Twilight
Without watches or phones in the classroom we entered the twilight time before clocks, the kind of twilight that accompanies the muse, the kind we can wrap around us indoors and leave the world to take care of itself for awhile. The reference to twilight comes from that in-between liminal feeling in the landscape at dusk, the gloaming hour when the other animals begin stirring, when, in all the stories, the elves and fairies begin their dance. But what is a habit of twilight?
A habit is defined as a settled tendency or practice, an acquired mode of behavior. What a thought, to acquire twilight as a habit…and then I realized that a habit is also something you wear; a long, loose garment worn by a person of a religious order or congregation. The idea of wearing a habit of twilight has taken hold as something I reach for; a cloak of twilight. I love seeing what happens when this atmosphere is in the classroom. As always, I can only give you a glimpse — here are a few of the book pages:
“Occult Power of the Alphabet”
In last month’s post, remake your world with words, we talked about the change-making potential of words and story. In this New Year’s post we will continue with this idea, sparked by another line from Gregory Orr’s poetry: the occult power of the alphabet. How can words, letters and stories become allies for hope and vision in this new year? Here is the first stanza of a much longer poem by Gregory Orr:
Occult power of the alphabet —
How it combines
And recombines into words
That resurrect the beloved
Every time.
The image of making words and recombining them, the feeling of resurrecting the beloved, stops me and fills me with desire to combine and recombine words. To feel the presence of the beloved. The last line of this stanza is only two words: every time. It resonates because this line is not folded into one compound word, but is two separate words with a pause in the middle. This vanquishes any doubt about the beloved returning. Now I am convinced that what the poem says is true; the alphabet, writing, has the power to resurrect the beloved every time — I only have to be willing to stay with it, to wait, to make myself an instrument, to be devoted to the time it takes.
The great wave is in waiting for any boat…
The worst is not to be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle.
— Sister Wendy Beckett
“Remake Your World With Words”
Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year, returns me to the theme of stars, night, silence and time. This painting was inspired by Gregory Orr, from one of his many untitled poems in Concerning the Book Which is the Body of the Beloved. Any of you, if you have written for long periods of time, know the power of words to create a spell.
Let’s remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
“Do you have hope for the future? Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied”.
There is much more that can be said about Robert Frost’s hope for the future, and, in retrospect, the past. But for now consider that one way of re-kindling hope and perspective is to take a time apart from news and entertainment and open the wide door to imagination, the muse and uninterrupted time. Sometimes you have to go away from the world to enter more fully. Re-fueling and opening to what prompts us was our aim at the recent retreat in Taos, New Mexico. Time moves by another dial and is expanded by all the cross-pollination of ideas in the room. The work that comes has the aliveness of something discovered along the way.