Weaving The Dream

In the early morning after the conversation with my husband about contribution, I had a dream. Here it is.

Six of Wands:

 I am in a school gymnasium at a concert.  The music director, the man that directed our two younger sons’ high school band, is acknowledging several students who performed well, along with a teacher and another adult who are successful in music.

Finally, he speaks about a student who tried to be part of the jazz band when he was in high school but wasn’t because at that time he was too shy, too intimidated.  But because he loves music, the student majored in guitar in college, developing his skills and performing jazz and rock.

 Suddenly, I see our oldest son, who was sitting next to the adult woman who had been recognized, get up and descend the bleachers toward the back because he knows the director is speaking about him.  I watch him descend and as he does he becomes the shy, sensitive young boy at 7.  But he swings around the bleacher support and heads for the director who announces his name.  It is not the boy but the adult who climbs up onto the stage to be recognized.  The audience claps and yells, and then rises to their feet, clapping and stomping and yelling.  Our son is at first stunned then delighted to the point where he sits down laughing and looks back at me with such pleasure.  And I am so happy for him.

Still in the dream, we talk afterwards and he is amazed and unable to figure out why he was so acknowledged and praised when he isn’t doing anything public with his music right now.  I answer that it is because he is still works with his music, composing and playing.  That he didn’t just play an instrument for several years in school so he could play John Phillip Sousa’s March in a school parade and then abandon it, but that he took a creative passion and continues to work and grow with it.  End.

I call the dream Six of Wands because in the tarot, that collection of 78 cards dealing with archetypes, elements and other symbols often used for divinatory purposes, the card implies victory, outward congratulations, and accolades.

Our son received accolades in the dream not just because he was successful in his music as defined by the director (and me), but also because he was a role model for creative achievement for others (and thereby made a contribution!). In other words, we give and receive accolades as a measure of our achievement, that what we set out to perform or create is a success and even…a contribution.

Receiving accolades means that others value what we offered in our performance or creation. Those accolades often help us move into and through the next creative effort.  But giving accolades is also important…to the giver.  Because, in addition to gratitude for the contribution of the performance, our cheering and clapping also signifies our, often unconscious, acknowledgement of what is also possible for us. We cheer others on in order to cheer ourselves on.

Not necessarily in the same venue—I do not desire to play jazz on the guitar—but with the same commitment to a creative passion.  With the same level of desire and joy and for the too rare experience of complete surrender to that transcendent creative moment that takes us out of ourselves into the greater Soul.

So cheer..and clap…and praise.  And may victory and accolades be yours.

Last night while walking our dog, my husband and I had a discussion about what it means to make a contribution to the world.

The automatic response from some people might be, “Solve world hunger.  Make a medical breakthrough.  Work with the poor.  Start a charitable foundation.” 

I understand why those would be the first responses.  Those are very public ways of contributing to the world.  Those ways would affect many.  Those ways would be seen and acknowledged by many.

And yet…

To contribute means to give—an idea, help, money.  The challenge for most of us who contribute is that our contributions seem too small, to affect too few. 

For instance, perhaps you have parented a son who will, in turn, become a wonderful father.  But if you are a parent who raises your children with love, respect and commitment, it could be years…and years before you have any clue as to what effect that loving parenting will have on the world.   

Or, if you are an employee—whether at MacDonald’s or MacDonald Douglas—and you work with commitment and responsibility and to the best of your abilities, can you imagine how that might improve morale and quality of work within the workplace?  But we don’t always get to see how good service and a quality product improves the lives of our customers.

Or, if you are a writer or painter or musician—you get the idea—who creates with commitment regardless of whether you are writing the music for your band or a symphony for the London Philharmonic, how do you measure your contribution?  By the size of the audience?  By the number of recordings sold?  By the money you make?

The idea of contribution, I think, becomes of greater concern the older we get, probably because we want to feel that we have meaning and purpose in our continued existence.  And yet, isn’t living well and role modeling how to age with wisdom and charity enough of a contribution?  Especially since so many of us struggle to do just that.  But it is hard to see if the role modeling we do has any long-term or widespread effect.  And yet other cultures value their elders because they hold the wisdom of lives well-lived.

If we are living our lives day to day while giving our help, our ideas, even our money with integrity, with commitment and consistency, with love and compassion, with imagination and joy, isn’t that a contribution to the world?  Isn’t that enough?
 

When I was in high school, a young folk music group out of the University of Colorado was making the rounds of college campuses and was appearing at the college my mom was attending.  She invited me to go with her to hear the group perform.

The name of the group?  The Serendipity Singers.

I don’t know whether my mom liked the word “serendipity” first and then the group or vice versa.  All I remember is that because she was taken with the word and liked to use it, I added it to my vocabulary and always think of her when I hear it.

Serendipity means making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. My mom, as an artist, liked the idea of happy accidents.

Serendipity is what happens when we are in the flow of our creative process, writing, painting, composing, or dancing.  We are working in our studios—practicing scales, researching a topic, or mixing paints—and suddenly a new juxtaposition of ideas occurs, or we play a sequence of notes a certain way and it catches just that nuance of meaning we were striving for, or the light falls on the rose in a way that has us seeing more than the rose we are painting.  Delightedly, our work takes flight.

Serendipity is a wonderful guest to have visit in your studio.  She gives you lovely gifts for your work wrapped up in pretty paper and tied with sparkly bows.  She makes creativity fun and exciting.

Years after listening to The Serendipity Singers with my mom, I read Carl Jung’s “Man and His Symbols” and I serendipitously discovered the idea of synchronicity.

Synchronicity means meaningful coincidence, or two seemingly unconnected events occurring at the same time in a meaningful manner.

You know, like the book that falls from the shelf in a thrift shop and has exactly the information in it you needed to provide background for your story, even though you were really there to look for a doorknocker.  Or like when you are driving to the gym, thinking about how the introductory measures of a new piece you are composing reminds you of a section in Beethoven’s Ninth which you’ve always enjoyed, and suddenly your car radio is playing Beethoven’s Ninth.

Synchronicity as a guest demands more attention than Serendipity.  He doesn’t wrap his gifts prettily but instead takes great delight in just plopping them on the table, or disguising them as something else, creating puzzles for you to ponder over and solve. But if you don’t get it, if you don’t take the gift to heart (while you try to figure out how to use it) and say thank you, chances are he will leave in a huff taking his gift with him.

Whether they are wrapped in pretty paper or disguised between the covers of an old musty book, the gifts from Serendipity and Synchronicity are treasures.  Leave the door open for these two inspiring guests, have tea and cookies waiting for them—and say thank you!

Oh no!  Not more football mania! 

I can just hear you moan.  But hey…I am the mother of three sons and my husband is a former Pittsburgher.  I’ll just have to be excused on the grounds of unavoidable indoctrination and defensive assimilation.

So…I watched most of the Super Bowl Sunday night with my husband. We knew that our two younger sons were also watching the game in their apartment in LA while our oldest son and his wife were watching the game in their home in Virginia just outside the nation’s capital where even President Obama was rooting for our team.

Usually, I hate watching the Steelers play because I am just not an adrenalin junky and, as their coach, Mike Tomlin said afterwards, Steelers football is never pretty–as they proved last night when it seemed all was lost until Santonio Holmes made a pass reception in the end zone that was unique.

And here’s the thing—as I watched the slow motion replay of his catch over and over, I watched his determination and his awareness of the ball and his position just this side of out-of-bounds.  I gaped at his self-control as he kept both feet on tiptoe firmly planted as he first caught the ball and then allowed himself to fall under a tackle. 

Since most of us would have instinctually moved one of our feet out to keep our balance, I admired Holmes’s ability to be so focused on what he needed to do that he could control his body’s own instincts. 

I thought, “Geez, that must have taken hours of training and preparation to be able to do that.”  Not to mention hours more experience of failing and succeeding to bring him and his team to this defining moment of success.

Here is a guy who sold drugs in high school to pay for shoes and clothes but who found something that was his heart’s passion—something he could give his all to in terms of commitment and work—to move him off of a path of self- destruction and on to a path of creative success and fulfillment. (And you can bet that, for Holmes, running and catching footballs is his form of creative expression.)

Holmes is very conscious of being a role model for young kids and their ability to move out of poverty and crime into a life of achievement.  What he probably doesn’t realize is that he is also a role model for creativity in three important ways:

1. Dream the impossible dream and then take action.  Holmes made the decision in high school that he didn’t want to spend his life standing on a street corner selling drugs.  He wanted something more…he wanted to play football.  So he stopped selling drugs and put his time and effort into playing on his high school football team, and then his college team.  And he did it so well that he was a first round draft pick for the NFL.
2. Be prepared and practice, practice, practice. Being successful creatively, whether we are writers, dancers (and Holmes appeared to have mastered ballet last night), singers, or painters, requires hours of consistent training.  That is, with rare exceptions, before we can move craft into art, before we can successfully express our ideas or visions, we first have to develop the necessary skills and techniques.  We know that Holmes spent hours in practice and preparation both on and off the field.  My mother was an artist in watercolor and colored pencils and in addition to years of schooling, every time she worked on a new painting or picture, she did study after study of the images in the picture.  She didn’t just sit down one day to paint and it was a success.
3. Be willing to fail in order to succeed. Holmes didn’t catch every pass made to him Sunday night.  But he didn’t give up and decide he couldn’t do the job when he missed a pass.  Instead, he believed in himself, and with 35 seconds left in the game, he asked his quarterback to trust him, to give him the chance to make the play.

I lied…there is one more important thing that Holmes did that we as artists and creatives need to do.  He put his whole being into making that catch.

Put your whole heart and soul into your work.  Create with passion and joy.

And then, when that work, like last night’s game, is over…

CELEBRATE!
 

Aaaaagh!  Gasp!  Cough!  Choke!

Procrastination has its hands about my throat once again!  Peeling back its fingers one by one, I am reminded that two years ago, just about this time, I wrote another post on procrastination.  In that post, I championed procrastination as a way of eliminating those things that are not worth doing.

However, this time procrastination has gotten such a firm grip on me that I am turning blue with all the unwritten words of blog posts and book projects.  Time to let me—and my creativity—breathe.

Just today, I read a quote that said, “Perfection is just another definition for procrastination.”  As I loosen procrastination’s determined fingers, I manage to nod my head in agreement.  After all, I want my posts to be perfectly written, perfectly grammatical, perfectly meaningful and perfectly…well, you get the picture.  Writing a perfect essay on some meaningful topic can be both fun and daunting.  So I procrastinate.

And then there is the issue that Steven Pressfield talks about in his book, “The War of Art”(more on that in future posts)—resistance.

Resistance teams up with procrastination, tripping us up or distracting us, while procrastination pounces on us and holds us immobile.

Resistance distracts us when we enter the studio with the sudden urge to clean up, or check email, or call a friend.  Or he sticks his big foot out every time we head to our studios or workspaces, keeping us from even entering, from even getting close to working.   And the deadly thing about how the two work together is that the longer we allow resistance to make us procrastinate, the less resistance has to work on us to get us to do it.  It’s kind of like that law of inertia we learned in high school science—that it takes more energy to get a body moving than it does to keep that body moving.

There is a secret there…if we can get ourselves moving on our creative projects, resistance and procrastination will have a bigger fight on their hands.  They will have to work harder to get us to stop.  And we’ll have to work less (hopefully) to keep going. 

That is the catch, though.  We have to keep going.  Today, tomorrow, the next day.  Because it is easier to win that battle with resistance on the first day than it is after a week or two or three of not doing our creative work.

So, hey.  I’ve pried procrastination’s hands from around my throat.  I’ve broken the resistance spell—for today.  And if I keep writing on my other projects today, maybe I will work up enough momentum that come tomorrow, resistance and procrastination will only get in a swing or two before they are trampled under my feet as I head for my studio. 

And no, I won’t give them a hand up.

So here I am with my husband at our oldest son’s, Stephen, home in northern Virginia.  He and our daughter-in-law, Mindy, just moved into this house last month and the living room is filled with unpacked boxes.

Yesterday, Bob helped Stephen install three new water-efficient toilets.  Over the years, Bob has shown his sons how to fix, mend, repair and replace what can’t be repaired.  Bob learned much of that from his father.

While Bob and Stephen took care of the toilets, I put on garden gloves, grabbed a rake and a pair of pruners and went outside to make an initial dent in the thick carpet of leaves that lay on all their flower beds and to trim back some of the shrubs.

Glad to be outside in the balmy (40 degree) weather in relative quiet, stretching and working my muscles, I piled up leaves and clipped back magnolia bushes and other shrubs.  As I worked, I was strongly aware not only of the passing of seasons but of the passing down of traditions and skills.

When Stephen was only five, Bob and I moved him and his two brothers to our 1840’s Greek Revival farmhouse in the foothills of the Catskills. Over the next few years, every time my mom and dad came to visit, Dad came prepared to help with the yard work—digging, weeding, planting, mulching.  Many times he brought divisions of his carefully grown daylilies for us to plant. 

Being my father’s daughter, I did for Stephen and Mindy, as my dad has done for Bob and I, raking leaves and pruning back deadwood.

Yesterday, I made sweet rolls for Thanksgiving breakfast, having taken up the tradition from my mother.  This morning, my son and I worked together at the sink to first clean and then prepare the turkey for roasting.  And I remember my mother standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, cleaning the turkey and suddenly lifting it by its wings to pretending this naked turkey was talking and squawking. My siblings and I laughed at her silliness.

While today’s turkey roasted, Mindy and I stood together preparing pies and I showed her how to crimp the crust the way my mother showed me.

Yesterday and today, I am overwhelmed by such a strong sense of the passing of seasons and the ongoing cycle of the generations.

Not everyone gets a chance to experience this.  Not everyone wants to. 

But I do.  So Bob and I are especially grateful this Thanksgiving for the opportunity to do for our son and daughter-in-law what our parents have done for my husband and I—pass on life skills and family traditions, and work to create a sense of home and an appreciation for the legacies and lineage that are our roots.

Even as I clipped the deadwood from an old magnolia at the corner of their house, I also noted the buds of new growth just waiting for Spring’s warmth to blossom forth.

And someday, as they fill this home with the new growth of the next generation, Stephen and Mindy will do for their child what Bob and I now do for them—and give thanks in the doing.

Autumn…makes a double demand.  It asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.  But it also asks we learn to let go…” Bonaro W. Overstreet in Meditations for Women.

Living in the northeastern part of our county, I’ve always loved autumn because of the intensity and clarity of color that the season brings.  The air is crisper, less humid, so the sky is a metal-bright bowl of blue arching over me.  Sugar maples are show-offs in their bright shifts of orange and red, especially next to the deeper, quieter black-greens of the pines.  Wild asters and grapes compete to define purple.

While reveling in the elixir of color that autumn brings, I can’t help but hear the footsteps of winter approaching, reminding me that all this piercing bright beauty will not last.

Just as the sugar maples and oaks let go of their leaves to make ready for their deep sleep beneath winter’s blanket, I am challenged to let go as well—of the weeding I didn’t complete, the plants I never planted, the vacation I didn’t take, the creative projects I didn’t finish, some I haven’t even started.

Autumn has also been a time of letting go of those I love.  My mother died 24 years ago this past September.  My paternal grandfather died six weeks after her.

And early yesterday morning, as the day was just being born, as leaves dropped silently and unseen in the night, I lost a sister of my heart—author, writer, and teacher, Liz Aleshire.  Liz was (and how hard to use past tense in this sentence) a woman of great courage and determination, of bright intelligence and wit, of fierce loyalty and friendship.  We’ve only been close friends for about seven years, but we traveled many creative and spiritual roads together.  It is hard to say goodbye.  To release our clasped hands.  To know she is no longer just a phone call away.  That she will never again sit on my patio looking out over our yard, smoking a cigarette while our dog, Duncan, keeps her company.

This is the challenge of autumn.  In the other seasons there is a looking forward to new growth, to warmth, to harvest.  In autumn, we look back, not forward, with the desire to spin out time, to slow the relentless fall of leaves, to push back the dark that arrives earlier and earlier each day.

But we can’t do it.  We can’t stop the trees from letting go of their leaves, we can’t slow the earth in its path around the sun.  We can’t stop Death in her tracks.

So we put mulch in the flowerbeds and stack wood for the woodstove, raising our heads to the sound of honking Canada geese as they wing their way to warmer climes. 

I whisper goodbye to Liz as she heads for her own Summerland of sunlight and flowers, where Nathan, her son, waits to greet her with both arms spread wide, laughter in his eyes and voice.

And my tears fall with the leaves.

A friend of mine, recently fascinated by the Greek goddess, Artemis (also known as the Roman goddess, Diana), made me realize that Artemis the Huntress is a good role model for creatives—for artists and musicians and writers and such.

Why?  Because she is the goddess of the forest–all that is wild and untamed and unknown.  With her bow and arrows, she both protects the chaos of the forest and captures whatever she hunts.

Like Artemis, I, too, am the goddess of a wild, untamed and unknown forest.  No, not my backyard.  My creativity.

I don’t know about you but I have myriad interests and abilities that sometimes make it hard for me to decide what to focus on first—a case of not being able to see the tree for the forest!

I easily lose track of priorities.  I often fail to act first on projects that will produce the most results.  And, because I work at home, I can spend days on details, reading email, doing research, and reading the latest professional journals (and baking cookies), before I realize that I’ve spent no time writing, weaving, or lining up work—a case of not seeing the forest for the trees!

I take the bow and arrow of my energy and, in essence, shoot at anything that moves, like a branch waving in the breeze, or a shadow moving beneath the leaves.  Not only am I apt to miss, I end up with a lot of wasted arrows I have to hunt for and nothing that can sustain me.  This makes me—and Artemis—unhappy.

Shooting hither and thither might sharpen my eye and build my muscles (have you ever tried pulling back on a bow?) and that is a good thing, but ultimately, if I am going to develop more than muscle—if I want to write a book, snag a speaking engagement, and bring home food for the table—I need to first, choose my target, and then take careful aim.

Today I am aiming at editing a manuscript and finishing the weaving of a shawl.

What are you aiming at?
 

It is daylily season.  

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have inherited close to fifty   different daylilies from my father as a result of the sale of my childhood home last fall.  He divided all his lilies so I had one of each kind, including and especially the ones he bred himself.

Daylilies are not really lilies.  They are hemerocallis from the Greek hemera (day) and kalos (beautiful).  Now, in mid-July, most of them are in bloom.  And my husband is entertained by my daily walks among these generous blossoms since I talk to them as I walk, complimenting each type on its beauty while I also remove the previous day’s dead blossoms. 

Even though many of the types put out numerous buds so that it seems they are in bloom for weeks, in fact each bloom only lasts one day.  All that effort, all that energy, poured into each bud, only for it to have one glorious day of bloom and color.  One glorious day to attract hummingbird and butterfly and bee for pollination and propagation. 

Last week, my husband, Bob, and I were in Austin, Texas for the wedding of his brother, Ted.  While out with his brother and siblings at a local nursery to buy a palm tree for the bridal couple’s wedding gift, Bob’s brother asked about an agave plant that had died in his front yard.   The nursery man in his sunglasses and cowboy hat nodded and asked, “Did it bloom?”  When the answer was yes, the nursery man told us that agave plants grow slowly, some for 15 years or more, gathering the nutrients they need to put forth blooms.  Then, once they bloom, usually with one blossom, and set seed, they die. Years of growth all to produce one tall bloom.

These plants remind me of the sand paintings done by the Navajo that are painstakingly created for ceremonial purposes and then destroyed at the end of the ceremony.  According to one source, the Navajo word for these sandpaintings means “the place where the gods come and go.”

Where the gods come and go.  Like the daylilies and the agave, the sandpaintings remind us that the Divine often resides in the act of creation as much, if not more so, than in the creation itself.  It is in the secret growth beneath the dark of soil and winter, in the determined reaching for the spring sun, and then the sudden glorious burst into summer bloom, that the mystery and celebration of Life, of creation is found.  The end result – the painting, the bloom, the plant are only temporary and make room for further creation.

We can get so focused on the end result – on the book, the play, the art exhibit, or the performance, that we often forget to give mindfulness, commitment, and value to the act of creating.  And in doing so, we can shut ourselves off from the transcendence of creation, from the experience of the Divine.

So when your published book seems light years away, when your stage performance is over before you know it, when the perfection of your creation is fleeting and then gone – remember the daylily and the agave. Give yourself to the moment of creation, where the gods come and go.

Summertime, like Sundays, used to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of renewal and restoration. Of recharging batteries drained by the demands of the year.

Not anymore.  We don’t know what it means to relax anymore.  We have to take classes on relaxation so we can learn how to stop our endless, and sometimes meaningless, motion.  So we can learn how to breath deeply from our bellies instead of only the upper third of our lungs.  So we can learn how to unclench our muscles and our stomachs and our jaws.

Our advanced technologies bring us so many advantages, but they also sabotage every effort to unwind, to get away, to get quiet.  They sabotage us because we let them.  We feel compelled to stay tuned in, turned on and accessible—afraid we will miss something important, earth-shattering, life-changing.

It is that accessibility that is life-changing, however.  When we fail to give ourselves time away or alone without distraction or interruption, without any intent or purpose other than to have none, we fail to nurture our souls.  And we definitely fail to nurture our creativity.

One of the hardest things for artists, writers, and other creatives is the ability to get away from our creativity.  So many of us work in studios in our homes where our work constantly calls to us.  Others have such limited time for creativity because of demands of work and family that each free moment becomes a challenge to fill it with our creative work.

Yet empty moments and time out of the studio are necessary to refill the well of our creativity.  It is in the silence and stillness that our spiritual and creative batteries are recharged, that our creative well is refilled. 

Summer is a good time to slowly sip the sweet refreshment of silence and stillness.  To sit on your patio to watch the birds dip and weave their ways through tree and bush. To float on your back in the water and watch clouds drift by. To stare up at the moon while she bathes you in light.

Be still.  Be silent. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you.  And so will your creative muse.

How will you give your creativity a summer moment?