West of the Moon Creative Retreat

It's Not Just Creative Writing, It's Creative Living

The Hidden Paths

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images“Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate

And though I oft have passed them by

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, part of Frodo’s walking song from Lord of the Rings

 

A few years after Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee return to the shire, Frodo makes up new words to an old song and sings it softly during a walk as he prepares for a new journey. Aside from the beautiful lyricism of the poetry and rhythm, it is the words that bring magic to this walking song.

This is a song of adventure and of faith. I use the term “faith” here in a spiritual sense rather than a religious. In this case, it is a return from a grand adventure of a lifetime that fosters Frodo’s faith and it is his faith that compels him to seek another adventure. Faith is a belief in the intangible, in things unseen but sometimes, things sensed or felt. It is a belief in something better, a working form of optimism.

What is adventure?

It’s not what happens to you. Rather, adventure is how you perceive the events of your life. For some, driving cross-country is a routine job to do as quickly and efficiently as possible. For others, a trip to the local grocer holds promise of the unknown. You define adventure. You determine whether you live a life filled with it. You.

A sense of adventure says there could be a new road or a secret gate around the next corner, a corner that you’ve come around most every day of your life. But this time…this time, maybe it’s different. And how does one believe in a hidden path, let alone find and take it?

This is the adventure of a creative soul. This is the life of the artist. We wake up believing. In what?

In everything. The creative believes in possibilities. The artists go to the medium with the faith that an adventure will take place, that on this page, one that looks just like all the rest, a new road might be found, a secret gate might be revealed. It is a faith that leads to the adventure.

The artist lives a life of faith and adventure because she knows anything less is not living. The artist develops and nurtures a creative practice to which she returns again and again, finding things that heretofore did not exist. Faith is knowing that one day she will take the hidden paths which shall be revealed only as the first step is taken and not before. Anything less and magic is removed from the adventure, faith is rendered unnecessary.

It is the same with a creative life.

It is the difference between waking up excited at possibilities and waking up dreading the routine.

This past week, we had a great deal of snow for the Nashville area. Crossing a parking lot I saw two pennies on a bare spot of concrete and picked one up, leaving the other. “Good luck!” I said to my friend as I held it up before pocketing it. “I’m not bending down for a penny and take a chance on messing up my back,” he replied. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

It made me think. No, I don’t believe that the serendipitous discovery of a copper coin will affect my fate. But I’m glad that I keep looking for those things not because they bring me luck, rather they remind me to be present, to remember the good things I am blessed with. They are keys to a secret gate, not the gate itself. One/one-hundreth of a dollar will not get you anything anymore. But an object can become a talisman in the hands of an alchemist. It becomes a symbol of the magic constantly surrounding us so, in a way, it can actually bring us luck.

I left the other penny hoping another traveller finds it on another adventure. As for me, it’s time for another walk. I feel a song a comin’ on.

Let Me Live Again

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“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity” – Charles Mingus

Creativity is who we are.

The fascinating thing is that it takes a lifetime to believe that.

We are creators.

But it takes the courage, the patience, the living experience to understand it…to believe it.

We live lives desperately trying to fit in when it is the essence of life to discover, to understand our uniqueness. What is it that makes us who we are?

I remember learning in grade school that every snowflake was unique. It was different from any snowflake that had ever existed. I had trouble believing that because when I looked out into the back yard (back when it really snowed in Nashville) all I saw was a big pile of snow. All white. All cold. All solid.

But I learned that each molecule was different, even as it combined to make the whole.

And so it is with us.

I am a creator. But I am a different creator from you, my friend. You are a creator too. But you are different. But not just different. You are different in such a simple way. I think that what Mingus was trying to say is that you are different from the essence of who you are. That’s the simplicity. That’s Dorothy learning that she knew all long how to get home. That’s how George Bailey learned how he had all of the adventure and paradise he longed for right within the walls of his home and his family.

Maybe we are called to be explorers of new lands or new ideas. Maybe we are called to be explorers of our own backyards. Neither is more important than the other. Both are unique.

One of the wonderful secrets to life is finding the magic where we are. Find the magic where we are called to be. It might be on the moon or in a castle in Tuscany. But it’s just as likely to be in a small frame house in Tennessee. You see, location isn’t important. The willingness to believe, the willingness to see the magic in the everyday, the “ordinary,” is what makes it awesome. It’s what makes life and living amazing. It’s what makes us unique and special. And we are. You are. You are as simple and as complex and magnificent as Bach or any of his symphonies. Or as Charles Mingus, who was brilliant enough to “get it.”

What If?

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Cabo sunset 001“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Whenever I work with writers, especially those who feel as if they’ve hit a dead end in their work, I encourage them to play the game of “what if.”

“What if” is exactly what it sounds like. And it is unrestricted. The focus of the game is to be playful and to get out of your left brain, rational, logical thinking, at least for the moment. It’s designed to return to that playful mode we experienced as children; when we made up stories and never, ever had “writer’s block.” Nothing was impossible.

What about life?

Sometimes we work so hard to live our own life story, we reach dead ends and don’t know where to turn. We reach a “life block.” We work so hard to do rational, logical, “grown-up” things and yet we move through life as if we’re not getting anywhere. People look around and ask, “is this all there is?”

The answer lies in your imagination.

If you only believe that the world of your senses, the world of your intellect, is all there is…you will be right. But, conversely, if you believe there is more, much more, maybe even life greater than your imagination, you will be right, too.

We live our lives and tell our stories, one often a metaphor for the other. Ultimately, when we write, we decide what possibilities exist for our characters. Ultimately, as we live, we decide what possibilities await for us. We build our own prisons and hold the keys to our release, but only some have the imagination to unlock the doors and venture outside. It is our logic that tells us the safety of the prison is better than the danger of the dragons that await outside.

But is the imagination that whispers “what if…”

What if you were made for slaying dragons?

What if the dragons aren’t what you thought?

What if dragons were actually quite tasty, served with an apple cranberry chutney and a decanted 1999 Brunello?

What if there are no dragons?

There are times in our life when logic and reason are necessary. But there is a season and a time for every things…times when we must escape the structured, limited, confining boundaries of our intelligence. Great works of art are not fashioned from the mind, they are created through the passion of the heart, the soul, and the imagination, all of which have some basis in reality. Life is ultimately not about what you know. It’s about what you don’t know, about what you are willing to learn, about what you are willing to dream…about what you’re willing to be.

Therein lies the fertile playground of the “what-ifs.”

And today is a perfect day to go out and play.

Mystery and Art

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Butterfly 1252“I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don’t know where it comes from.” ~ D. H. Lawrence

[There is] “the edge between what is known and what is never to be discovered because it is a mystery transcendent of all human research.” ~ Joseph Campbell

More often than not, when we seek answers we immediately grab our smartphones and Google or use other search engines to find the concrete, to learn the facts. Our science is advancing so rapidly that new facts replace old in the matter of days instead of centuries. Our access to information is unlike anything dreamed of fifty years ago as we read our newspapers, listened to radios, and watched televisions.

There is a story, however apocryphal, that in the 1950’s, then President Eisenhower was led into a room with was completely filled with an enormous computer. The engineers challenged the President to ask a question to the computer. The President thought, then asked the engineers to program in the question, “is there a God?”

The computer whirred and hummed for about ten minutes, which was considered to be quite fast in the day. Then lights flashed and a buzzer sounded and a card spat out…”there is NOW!”

Although I laughed at the story, to some degree, information has become a god. To some degree, technology and science have become gods. We live in a time when we believe everything can become known…will become known.

Don’t misunderstand. I love to study and learn. I want to know more. But adding to my accumulation of information does not lessen my wonderment or belief in magic, in mystery. Neither science nor technology can explain love. No amount of research can explain why people will sacrifice themselves for others whom they do not know. There are things so beyond our understanding that we cannot even begin to describe, what Campbell calls the “what is never to be discovered.” In essence…the mystery.

And just because we cannot see, because we cannot describe or articulate something beyond our conscious ability, some would argue this as the evidence that it does not exist. But artists know better.

That is why the artist is just as important as the scientist or the engineer to our cultures and civilization. Because no matter how much we learn, how much we can know, even if one day, everything in the sensory world is explained, there shall always be the ineffable. There shall always be the mystery.

This is what the poet understands and conveys through imagery and metaphor. This is what the painter knows and illustrates through strokes and colors. This what the storyteller learns through the telling of her story which when revealed from the depths, the land of dreams and visions, resonates from soul to soul, revealing a collective consciousness, always there but never experienced.

Art is a tangible through which the heart feels and knows and experiences the mystery. It is all we have and yet it is more than enough. We do not need mystery to be explained or understood. We just need to experience transcendence. We need it as much as we need air and water and food. For without transcendence, there are no breaths, there is no refreshment, there is no nourishment. Without transcendence, there is no ecstasy, no amazement, no wonder, no mystery. No awe.

Celebrate that within you that keeps your eyes open, your heart vulnerable, your imagination free and wild, your belief in magic and mystery active and alive, and that keeps your inner child at play. That is your artist within. That is who you truly are. And that is why you were created.

To create.

The Power of Rituals

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WritingI love coaching creatives and being part of their creative journeys.

And the best part of the coaching, so far, has been to see writers smiling and saying they are writing again, creating again. Because, I believe, that is our natural state. We are all creators. That is part of our collective myth. It is at the heart of our individual myths.

Your personal myth is your story, the story of who you really are, the center from which you live, love, and create.

One of the initial reasons people come to work with me is that they are simply not writing, not creating. And they are frustrated. They feel guilt. They are stressed. The clock is ticking and they have nothing to show for their time. Because they are not creating, they doubt their abilities, citing the lack of productivity as clear evidence they are not writers. Some even go so far as refusing to acknowledge they are really writers.

The first step in working with creatives is helping them learn their own story, their own myth. Remove the world’s expectations. Remove the parents’ hopes and dreams. Eliminate the well-intentioned third grade teachers admonitions and directions. Remove checkbooks and mortgages. Quiet the voice without and within. Who are you? Now…who are you, really? And there we begin on a journey to you.

Joseph Campbell says that a ritual is the enactment of a myth. I like that. It is a tangible way of participating in the myth. In the life of a creative, a ritual is a practice you establish to participate in who you are as a creative. In essence, a ritual becomes a entryway to your practice as a creative, regardless of how you express your creativity.

Think of the other areas of your life in which you participate in rituals. Our religious lives are filled with rituals we observe to connect us with the sacred. Think of your family, especially at the holidays, when we gather and do things a certain way, whether knowing where everyone will sit at the table, how we open our presents, stories always read or shared, movies always watched, whatever. These are all rituals that give expression to the myth we live, the myth of our life.

A ritual is sacred in the sense that it leads you to something greater within you. When created according to your own personal myth, a ritual leads you to…well…you. Because at your very essence, your very core, you, my dear friend, are a creative.

A lot of creatives just catch snatches of time here and there, plop down, and expect Faulkner to pour forth in about the same time your barista can whip up a double espresso and you consume it. When you make time for your art and approach it with your rituals, designed to help you participate in your own myth, your own life, the results are different. The critical, doubting voices all creatives hear begin to fade. The world is put back into its proper perspective. Expectations and demands are not allowed. Through our personal ritual, we prepare ourselves, full of wonder and anticipation, to just express. You deserve no less my friend.

It Really Is About Creative Living

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Creativity is at the root of everything we do.

Our Western culture tends to compartmentalize art and creativity and, in doing so, minimizes their value. But life itself is created and nurtured through childhood. Creativity and art, imagination and exploration, are encouraged during these years.

LabyrinthBut then we’re taught that we must get serious, be serious about life. And most of us leave our art and creativity behind. As Wordsworth writes, the “Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy” and we follow what our culture tells us is right, what we must do, how we must “grow up.”

Writing, painting, photography, sculpting, weaving, and all of the many other forms of artistic expression are ways we learn who we are, are ways we process these lives we lead. They are expressions of our essence, our very souls. Joan Dideon said “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” 

Art is about expressing the inexpressible. Art is about metaphor through which we sense and feel that which we cannot express with words. Art is beyond language, beyond borders, genders, religions, beyond anything that separates us. Art is that which resonates so deeply we begin to understand that on that level, we are all truly one.

And so we find ways we can come together with others of like mind, to get away in an idyllic setting, away from the routine, the requirements, the numbing repetition of existence, to find and reclaim our art and, therefore, ultimately our lives. And once reclaimed, we can return home, knowing that the magic was never in that location but rather, is within each of us. It is us and is wherever we are, whatever we do, and is part of that essence that this world has never seen before and will never see again. And ultimately we realize that by retreating we are never “getting away from” but rather, if we are lucky, we live a life in which we are always following our own sacred path toward who we are meant to be.

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The Intention behind West of the Moon is to help writers and other creatives recognize and move beyond obstacles to a creative life.

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