Conversations with a Soul (6 page)

What happened to us?

Who or what robbed us of a priceless piece of our identity?

What is the source of that dark power that keeps us from enjoying our birthright to be joyous, creative beings?

Then, no sooner have I dared to ask that question than I sense a gathering of my Wisdomkeepers. I sense that they want to speak to me about a journey I need to undertake, a journey to reclaim and rediscover the joy and wonder of my own originality.

They warn me of the dangers of such a journey, for when we journey into the heart of that which we fear we become vulnerable. Our personal daemons, placated by our willingness to surrender ourselves to their custody, will be provoked and borrowing the voices of some who claim to know us best will hurl warnings about the foolishness of the journey. Yet the Wisdomkeepers assure me that the only power wielded by the daemons is the power I give them!

Whatever the root causes of this bizarre, self-negating behaviour might be, and there are probably many, its mere appearance is reason enough for us to re-engage the realm of creativity, and there, guided and enabled by our community of Wisdomkeepers, find our way to rediscover the joy and wonder of our own originality.

I suspect that the first step on this journey is to learn that there is a big difference between, what we might call, an
innate ability
to do certain things
and a
creative mind
with which we are all gifted but which needs tending and honouring and a great deal of practice.

Not everyone is born with an innate ability to draw or paint, not everyone has a natural aptitude to play a musical instrument or sing or pick up foreign languages or carve wood or stone or any of the hundreds of things we generally ascribe to
creative people
.

We assign creative people to a class all their own. Too soon the words tumble from our insecurities that
we are not as good as …..,
and at that precise moment we have betrayed ourselves. We have fallen into the trap of seeing life as a contest.

Is it not possible to simply enjoy writing or carving or painting without being compelled to have our creation evaluated by entering it into a contest?

A contest! Maybe that’s part of the problem.

Even before we could protest we were in danger of being entered into a contest where our hair, eyes, mouth or face needed to be evaluated as better than or not as good as someone else's baby. To what greater heights of stupidity can we aim?

Stupidity indeed, yet every day we surrender to a world view based on the assumption that life is all about competing. A part of the journey my Wisdomkeepers seek to initiate is a journey that leads me to question that assumption and then engage in a struggle to choose to live from a very different set of core values.

I sometimes fear that the male species has indeed succumbed to a fatal dose of testosterone poisoning! It appears almost impossible for us to engage life in any manner other than a competitive one. The world about us seems to invite a grand battle in which we
tame
the land, we
conquer
we
develop
all in the pursuit of profits.

We are only now learning a new language, one based on the principle of
cooperation,
because we suspect that our triumph (
sic
) over the land is leading us towards disaster and we had better find some creative, cooperative ways of living with the earth.

Our political and economic languages are also based on the principle of warfare. Most of our “-isms” (Communism, Socialism, and especially Capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) are male inventions in which control and domination form the central pillars.

It’s here at this point, that my Wisdomkeepers challenge me to dare risking another approach to life. They speak of replacing my need to win with a need to cooperate; to replace the language of conquest with a language of gentle encouragement; they point the way to nurture my environment rather than destroy it, something that most women seem to intuitively understand. Above all they suggest that there is much richness to be found in replacing the language of conquest with that of intimacy.

Life does not have to be a giant contest between winners and losers but the change begins at the level of honouring ourselves. We were created to be creative, even if we sometimes don’t feel like it.

I have always envied singers and musicians who, with absolute confidence, launch themselves into an impromptu performance, thereby instantly becoming the toast of the party.

I, in the other hand, would sooner wrestle a crocodile than croon my way through,
'I left my heart in San Francisco.' 
Fortunately, those who have heard me sing are highly unlikely to extend an invitation so as to hear me a second time! But that doesn’t mean I cannot sing and it doesn’t prevent me from giving a magnificent performance before an audience of one – me!

I think it’s generally true that when we are invited to sing a song, write a story or draw a landscape, we run right into our fear of inadequacy. “Oh no, I could never do that! I am useless at …..” and wrapped in those words we toss away our birthright, we disqualify ourselves from seeing ourselves as creative!

Matters are made worse by a common perception that only those who have received public recognition for their artistic or technological prowess dare lay claim to being creative. The rest of us are relegated to a place amongst the admiring masses that offer applause and seek autographs.

But what if creativity has little to do with performance and everything to do with the art of
seeing possibilities?

Long before the canvass is hung, the novel published, the dance commenced or the symphony played, someone was at work looking for and finding possibilities for artistic presentation. Even minor challenges: a lump of clay on a pottery wheel, a Halloween costume created out of bits and pieces from an old clothes chest, a tastefully arranged vase of flowers, or an elementary school Christmas pageant, are all preceded by someone sifting through the options and seeing the possibilities.

Some people, usually those who rely heavily upon their intuition, seem to have little difficulty in seeing possibilities. Things connect with each other. They have no problem putting it all together
in the head
. Of course the rub comes when the beautifully clear internal image must migrate into a visual, concrete world.

Others of us find that seeing possibilities is a skill that needs to be worked at, and in this we are in good company. Many talented artists struggled to see possibilities for themselves and their life’s work. Some had to deal with intense loneliness, some with rejection; some spent a lifetime searching for their own creative genius. Yet numerous are the stories of men and women who stuck with a dream because they had glimpsed possibilities and the seeing became a vision and that vision became the most powerful force in their lives.

Whether seeing possibilities comes easily or whether we have to work at it, we all need to learn to trust our intuition, be guided by our imagination, and refuse to accept anyone’s limitation on our creative energies. In this enterprise a great ally is playfulness. Play is often the cradle in which creative energy is to be found, which is why children are so at home with creativity.

On the mornings when it is warm we walk our grandsons, together with their buddies, to school. Through a forest, along a tow path that runs alongside a canal, over two narrow bridges, then a shortcut through a tiny suburb and we finally arrive at the school. A walk that should have taken us 15 minutes has taken nearly 45, but then there were those unique stones that needed to find a home in someone’s pocket; interesting looking twigs that can be tossed off the bridge; duck families that needed to be inspected and long and complicated conversations to be engaged. The walk to school has nothing to do with going to school but everything to do with playing amidst the world’s great wonders. They intuitively understood William Blake’s observation:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.
¹⁵

Richard Nash’s
The Rainmaker
includes a dialogue between Starbuck and Lizzie that gets to the heart of seeing the possibilities:

STARBUCK: …
Nothing’s as pretty in your hands as it was in your head. There ain’t no world near as good as the world I got up here, (
angrily tapping his forehead
). Why?

LIZZIE:
I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you don’t take time to see it. Always on the go – here, there, nowhere. Running away … keeping your own company. Maybe if you kept company with the world …

STARBUCK: (doubtfully)
I’d learn to love it?

LIZZIE:
You might – if you saw it real. Some nights I’m in the kitchen washing the dishes. And Pop’s playing poker with the boys. Well, I’ll watch him real close. And at first I’ll see just an ordinary middle-aged man – not very interesting to look at. And then, minute by minute, I’ll see little things I never saw in him before. Good things and bad things – queer little habits I never noticed he had – and ways of talking I never paid much mind to. And suddenly I know who he is – and I love him so much I could cry! And I want to thank God I took the time to see him real
.
¹⁶

There’s a world of difference between my history and my story. The wonder of my Wisdomkeepers is that they could trace
my story
as it grew and changed amidst the bits and pieces of
my unfolding history.

Living a creative life is about seeing the possibilities in the ordinary and the everyday. Frequently it means learning to look at others in a way which allows us to see
their
possibilities. Almost always it means we have to slow down our rush to judgment, and our tendency to discard someone because they fail to be in the way we want them to be, and that includes ourselves. If we could be set free from our self-imposed limitations, we would dare to dream of new solutions to old problems, and find fresh possibilities for our dead ends. There’s a genius in every one of us, obvious to our Wisdomkeepers, which is just waiting to bust out!

In the year 1831 one of those marvellous old fashioned scientific expeditions was to set forth; a schoolmaster named John Henslow suggested that one of his former pupils be appointed naturalist. The lad was then 22; he had been rather dull at school, hopeless in math, although a keen collector of beetles from the countryside; he was hardly different from the others of his type and class: hunting and shooting, popular member of the Glutton Club, aimed for the clergy. He had a “typical family complex” as we might say today, soft in the mother and dominated by a 300-pound father. But Henslow saw something and persuaded the parties involved, including the pupil named Charles Darwin that he makes this journey.
¹⁷

Newspaper reports, books and magazine articles, frequently tell stories of men and women, who have faced the most devastating injuries, yet have fought their way back to life. Amputees, paraplegics, victims of violent crime, casualties of human weakness, each have a story that would justify a retreat from life and disengagement from others. Yet, that’s not how their story ends. These persons, frequently, through the strength of
their
Wisdomkeepers, started to see possibilities beyond the walls of hopelessness. They have gone on to build creative lives, and forge rich relationships, none of which would have been possible, had they not started seeing possibilities in the midst of disaster and despair.

Seeing possibilities is a tricky task best suited to a playful mind set more than a ponderous work ethic, which is probably why children are so good at it. Great artists practiced drawing a hand or a foot or an eye over and over again, without the attendant crushing burden of failure, so often the assistant to work. Learning to use an artificial leg means falling and getting up, falling and getting up, until the possibility of walking again muscles its way into our consciousness, and suddenly life has taken on a new, creative purpose.

Playfulness frequently gives way to humour, and humour frequently opens the door to seeing possibilities. When we treat the absurdity of ourselves to a healthy belly laugh, we are already on the way to seeing possibilities, joined in laughter by an unseen community of Wisdomkeepers.

Farther on, and deeper into the forest there is a tangled space where sunlight is exiled, birdsong silenced, laughter banished, dead trees lie twisted and bent into grotesque shapes, and in the pervasive chilling gloom even the tiny animals of the forest feel the need to hide from some unseen malevolent, presence.

We have arrived at the
place of despair
.

Reflecting on the power of despair, during a period in my own life, I once wrote:

Of late I have walked in the midnight places of my own soul.

Walking here, I have discovered a strange land inhabited by strange creatures.

Here I have seen the birthplace of despair and watched it grow nurtured and enlivened by the milk I fed it.

Here, with trembling limbs, I have explored some of the unopened passages of my own freedoms and wondered at both the vastness of choice and my comfort with imprisonment.

Here I have crawled away beaten by warfare with fear, knowing that my enemy drew strength from my imagination and was free to pick the high ground for the next assault.

Here I have sensed my own frailty and sought with hunger for companions who might understand me and, for a little while, keep me company.

Here I have looked with terror at footprints left by a part of me I have not yet met and listened with fascination to the wild music of my undiscovered self.

Here I have stumbled upon moments of sheer wonder and hope which seem to have been left in my path by some gracious, unknown guardian and also learned disgust as I gave them away to some marauding bully.

Is this an experience of Gethsemane, where I watch my own slow dying, or is this the place of Transfiguration, where the radiant truth of all things is made visible, or is it both?

I know not, only that I have walked in the midnight place of my own soul and that the journey continues.