Did you know that your words can kill your creative writing?
Odd sounding, but true. I made this discovery while jogging. But what I’m going to say here applies just as much to other activities that can promote creative thought – for example, walking, gardening or even just taking a shower.
I’d started jogging for exercise in my early twenties, but it quickly turned into a “runner’s high” experience. Jogging became meditative for me. And creative.
Much of the language for Original Faith and in my poetry came to me while literally on the run. Sometimes thoughts or ideas came to mind, but far more often, I’d get phrases and imagery that were “keepers” – specific language that I wasn’t nearly clever enough to think up at will and that fit perfectly into the book manuscript.
One day not long after this process of running-writing had started for me, I was out jogging and a couple of nice lines came to mind with a third underway. I could see that something pretty substantial was developing. So I circled back toward my parked car.
I thought I’d jot down my words in the small notebook that I kept in my glove box. I could sense that a lot more was coming and I didn’t want to forget it. Plus I wanted to be able to run without having to remember stuff.
I climbed into my car, reached for my notebook and pen, and pushed back the seat. I jotted down the first thing I’d thought of, then the second. Then I thought hard and the third thing that had started getting underway came into focus. I finished it off.
And then nothing. Nothing! I’d killed my own creative process!
Where do you do your most creative thinking?
Did you ever accidentally cut it short? How did you handle it the next time?
It seems to me that most human beings are aware of having a greater nature and a lesser; a more expansive, generous self, and a self full of agitated emotions.
The terminology gets tricky because people use these two words in so many different ways, but I call the one love and the other ego.
With young children, both these dimensions of being human are out in the open. I found my work as an elementary school counselor helpful in forming my understanding of human nature.
This is my first comment to a new post today at Jan Lundy's Awake is Good.
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And when do we start to love the earth itself, when do we come to think the world of the world - and what happens with further delay?
Global Warning:
New York, Boston "Directly in Path" of Sea Level Rise
By 2100 visitors to Boston could be parking their boats, not their cars, in Harvard Yard. Major cities in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada are directly in the path of the greatest rise in sea level if Greenland continues to melt due to global warming…”
Christine Dell'Amore, National Geographic News May 28, 2009
Martin Luther struggled with a terrible sense of sinfulness. He tried all the tools at the disposal of a monk of his time time to overcome it: not just a great deal of time and effort spent in prayer, fasting and confession, but also, if I recall correctly, some of the more extreme methods of his day – the horsehair jacket, bed of nails, flagellation...
Eventually he had the insight that became the original impulse of Protestantism: “justification by faith alone” and not by works of any kind. He came to feel that salvation arrives as a sheer, incomprehensible gift to the faithful and that there’s nothing a person can do to earn it. Amazing grace. This brought him a sense of gratitude and peace that his earlier efforts had not.
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It’s interesting how a particular religious or spiritual issue can be important in one person’s life and yet of little to no importance in another’s. Also, how it’s possible for us to work through an issue until we find resolution.
Examples of Spiritual and Religious Issues:
Ego. My guest post today on Awake is Good is an example. Sin and grace. Enlightenment. Personal immortality. Staying in the church or leaving. Science as a challenge to religion. The problem of evil. The idea of free choice and whether people bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. Life’s unfairness.
More Issues - brought out by commenters to this thread:
How to understand the bible. Literally? Metaphorically? The "dark night of the soul..." Judgment - how and whether to judge others, God's judgment...
What’s a spiritual or religious issue that’s been of past or present importance to you – and why? What made it important? Alternatively, what’s something that’s never been an issue for you that you’ve seen others struggle with?
Author Jan Lundy has invited me to be a guest on her “Awake is Good” blog. Thanks, Jan!
It struck me as odd this morning that while Civil War soldiers are counted among American veterans, I’ve never heard the original American-on-American war referenced on Memorial Day. That struggle began in the seventeenth century and continued into the late nineteenth, proceeding from east coast to west.
East of the Mississippi: The Pequot War, Creek War, the Seminole Wars and Tecumseh’s War. West of the Mississippi: “Indian Wars” that included the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Creek War of 1813-14, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre and Wounded Knee.
Many Federal troops died, but of course many more Native American men, women and children perished. While the names of a handful of their great leaders are remembered, the names of ordinary warrior and civilian deaths went entirely unnoted by those who displaced them.
Native Americans lived here for over 10,000 years. We have a great deal to learn from what they died fighting for.
Because although the kind of balance with nature practiced by Native American cultures can’t be replicated, the kind of imbalance practiced by ours can’t be sustained.
“How can we buy the sky? How can you own the wind? The air is precious. It shares its spirit with all the life it supports. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Wherever we do to the web, we do to ourselves"
- Chief Seattle, abridged remarks
“The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia.”
An article on Urban Monk.net begins with an interesting metaphor. I started to leave a comment and decided to turn it into a post. From UM.net:
"Two ducks float peacefully along in their pond; suddenly one crosses too far into the other duck’s territory. A fight starts – fast and furious. It lasts for only a few seconds before just as suddenly they float off in their respective directions. As they do so, they flap their wings furiously, and then they return to their peaceful floating as if the fight never happened."
This led me to think:
I wonder if ducks don't get over things so quickly because of not identifying with themselves in quite the way that we do. A duck is part of the larger world and unselfconsciously dwells there, one with all, whenever its borders aren't under actual threat. Even when they are, its response is proportional – it’s never a duck out of the larger water.
If humans ever really catch on to the idea of humanity that the wide world has tried to hatch with us, then it will be because we have become like ducks who have noticed their true place and position in life.
Altered States of Consciousness: Can Your Brain Do This?
I thought I’d do a couple or a few or maybe a series of posts on ASCs. I guess pain could count as an altered state of consciousness, so that last post got me started.
Here’s one of the most unusual – and trivial – that I’ve ever had. To me the triviality is interesting because you usually think of an ASC as being significant or at least unusual in a more or less spectacular sort of way.
Fortunately this only happened the one time. I’ll add that although it was the seventies, this was not a drug induced experience. As you may begin to suspect, I didn't need drugs.
So I’m in a modern poetry class at the University of New Hampshire circa 1977. I’m really bored. The classroom’s hot and stuffy. I don’t care much for the poetry we’re reading. It might have been that one about the chicken and the red wheelbarrow.
My eyes wander to the other side of the room where I notice a girl and have the following stream consciousness:
She’s kind of cute even if her glasses are funny. But what’s she doing with her mouth? Why does she keep wriggling her jaw around like that? It’s too much for gum. Is she having some kind of . . . dental problem?? This is so weird . . . She just keeps moving her jaw around. But she seems cool with it. Doesn’t really look – bothered or anything . . . But why? How come? What’s she doing it for?
Then, after a full thirty to forty seconds, I realize that the voice I’ve been hearing in the background all along belongs to her. She’s been, uh – talking.
I sit up straight and look around at everybody in the room, but nobody else is moving or acting like anything had just happened. Which is about what you’d normally expect. I had just come up with the answer to "2 + 2" but everyone was taking "4" for granted, and I could see the futility of trying to raise the group's consciousness.
- I’ll add that I normally write with my right hand, but if I use my left, it comes out perfectly, only backwards.
- Back in the sixties and seventies when the vertical or horizontal adjustment would go out of whack on the TV and those annoying bands would go up and down the screen, instead of getting up and banging the side of the TV I could just stay on the sofa and bang the side of my head to fix it.
- OK, I made up that last one . . .
Anyway, I'm betting that you never had the “Jaw in Motion Vision,” right? But did you ever have any other sort of ASC that was interesting but not so profound? We can talk about profound ones later . . .
(Thank you to Lisa at Mommy Mystic for inviting me to guest post. I like Lisa's writing. She's a good thinker and she expresses herself clearly in a subject area where this isn't always easy.)
Overcompensating One thing leads to another, and the other day I had another toenail pulled out and cauterized. I’ve been housebound for . . . I’m losing track. Think it will be five years in December. Podiatrists are the only specialists who’ll come to your home, so every now and then I have one come over and yank out another toenail to compensate for the sensory deprivation.
This time it hurt quite a bit, but the first time I had this procedure done it hurt a lot more – maybe because it was the big toe or maybe because there was a miscommunication between me and the podiatrist that left her with the unfortunate impression that I wanted the injections done with unusual slowness. They do two injections, each directly into a nerve at the base of the toe. The injections are to numb your toe prior to yanking out your nail. And although the pulling and tugging and scraping make you a little queasy, getting the nail yanked out is sort of a treat because you're so happy not to have needles in your toe nerves.
Alternate Universe I was surprised the injections were so painful. For several years I was misdiagnosed with Myofascial Pain Syndrome and received hundreds of trigger point injections. Then, for another several years after the doctors clearly saw that they had absolutely no idea what I have, I got pretty much every blood test ever devised. So the human pin cushion thing was no big deal. At most, those injections only pinched. (Btw, acupuncture is nothing – don’t ever hesitate if it seems worth trying. The needles don’t penetrate into the skin enough to hurt.)
But that first toe nail removal was interesting. With her initial slow, deliberate and steady intrusion into my nerve (sorry for the racy language), it was like my mind collapsed into a black hole and I emerged in an alternate universe called My Toe Really Hurts. When the doctor asked if I was ready for the second injection I said OK only because I knew it would be unreasonable to request a few more hours in the Milky Way Galaxy to think it over.
Om vs. Ouch Anyway, between that first time and this time, I’d wondered about my state of mind once I'd said Yes to the needle. And this time, maybe because it hurt a little less - but I think more because I was wondering and noticing - I saw what my mind does.
Kind of hard to describe, but it’s like just before I say “OK” I make my mind go blank, only in a very alert way. It’s really passive but really alert. Just before the needle goes in, I pretty much succeed in paying a whole lot of attention but thinking about nothing at all - which, in an odd way, reminds me of meditation. I have to say, however, that once I get the needle, my mind is no longer blank and becomes “Owwwww" instead of “Om," making me one with my toe.
What do you do with your mind when you know something is about to hurt a lot? And while it’s actually hurting, can you say Om or just Ouch?
Thanks to Lisa at Mommy Mystic for inviting me to guest post. I like Lisa's writing. She's a good thinker and she expresses herself clearly in a subject area where this isn't always easy.
And thanks to Jessica, a first grader at Hilltop School in Somersworth, New Hampshire, perhaps twelve years ago, for inspiring the poem that concludes my guest post - plus what follows below. So many kids were an inspiration to me during my twenty three year career; I just hope they learned half as much from me as I did from them!
Erin and Jessica Teach Me How to Help with School Phobia
When I knew Jessica, she was a first grader with golden blond hair that was neatly pulled back to reveal an open face with strikingly blue eyes – not light blue, but dark, and with large black pupils. Although Jessica had a good sense of humor and was quick to smile, she was usually quiet and serious.
She was the tallest child in her class. Jessica wasn’t heavy or gangly, and in fact was a beautiful little girl, just big for a first grader. And this wasn’t because she was older; Jessica was on grade level.
She was referred to me for school phobia. Her mom had a tearful struggle on her hands every morning trying to get Jessica first out the door and then onto the bus. The good news was that once Jessica got to school, she was fine. The bad news was that her absenteeism was a cause for growing concern.
After one or two meetings with Jessica, I happened to be in her classroom early one morning. Her best friend, Erin, was aware that I’d become involved. The one thing that Erin and Jessica clearly had in common was that both girls were kind and thoughtful. Everything else was opposite: Erin was not only chatty and extroverted, but the tiniest girl in class! She moved, spoke and thought quickly. And that morning, she turned to me to exclaim, “Mr. Martin! That’s Jessica’s bus! I wonder if she’s here?”
“Let’s go check!” I said. Erin called out: “Hey Kimmy, Lisa – let’s go see if Jessica came!”
I followed the girls out onto the playground but stayed back to watch Erin and company run to stand by the bus door. As Jessica descended the steps, I saw her face turn from very serious to surprised to a beaming smile as her friends squealed, jumped up and down and hurrahed a brief but highly energetic elementary school cheer!
From then on, every morning I’d head down to Jessica’s classroom at her bus arrival time. Jessica’s greeting squad would have already assembled itself or would eagerly do so with a prompt from me. Jessica enjoyed celebrity status for another few weeks; by then her school phobia was gone, never to return.
I use the words “spiritual” and “psychological” as follows:
“Spiritual” refers to the most powerfully experienced, powerfully motivating and therefore the most productive and creative aspects of our inner lives when we become highly aware of them. These include love, faith and the experience of our direct relationship with the One in whom we live and move have our being, whether we think of the One as life or being itself or as God.
“Psychological” refers to the self or personality as a whole. While this includes our spiritual nature, it also includes our egoism and the ways in which our spirituality and egoism express themselves – and often struggle with each other – through the unique set of abilities and forms of intelligence that we have as individuals.
Streamline the process. Get over it -- whatever it is – in no more time than it has to take. No lingering.
Learn how to get to, “What’s done is done” – or you will be finished given enough misfortune.
Enter the larger room each time, closing the door behind you.
To elaborate . . .
Timjamz and Fr. Scott left comments to the previous thread that make me want to add a couple things:
Processing v. Lingering: “Streamlining” or moving on efficiently is certainly easier said than done. And some things do take processing time – for example, major losses – but this is a different sort of thing than the “lingering” mentioned above.
Mindfulness: Though easier said than done, there are ways to go about it. Most of them fall into the broad category of mindfulness. The essence of mindfulness is to notice one’s repetitive, unproductive thoughts and their associated agitated emotions. Observe that they are occurring – “That again!” – rather than get caught up in a full session of ranting, bemoaning, resenting, “if-onlying” etc.
My personal reference pointfor this post: year sixteen of an incurable illness that has seen me lose one physical ability/form of independence after another. I've needed to learn how to move on expeditiously in order to survive, and I’d have to assume that it would be the same for anyone who gets hit hard enough/long enough by major adversity.
When you think about it, exercising choice is exercising a kind of mental muscle. I don’t know if any actual calories are burned, but in effect, it’s the energy involved with saying, usually to oneself, “OK! That’s it! I’ve decided!”
Usually this is preceded by a period of prior mental exertion in which we weigh alternatives – although there is also the phenomenon of the spontaneous or impulsive choice.
So the essence of choice, deliberated or spontaneous, is the “OK! That’s it! I’ve decided!” phenomenon. We close one door and open another. Our mental status is “Go” – ready for action.
I Think I Just Strained My Free Will Muscle . . .
So the free will vs. determinism argument is finally about whether such mental exertions, deliberated or impulsive, are the necessary outcomes of our deliberations/impulses or whether each time we perform this type of exercise, it’s really the outcome of – free will?
How does our will get free of our prior deliberations or impulses? Or maybe the locus of freedom is further back in the process – we freely choose whether to be impulsive or deliberative, or maybe we freely choose the nature of our deliberations - ??
