Play First, Work Later (& delight your inner child)

 

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise. 
     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.
     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.

For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

Drawing by RM

 

Our Most Potent Muse

Our most potent muse is our inner child.               

                 -   Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play

“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves,” said Carl Jung. An earnest man at one of my lectures once asked me to summarize what I consider essential practice. I said, “Remember to play.” He carefully wrote down those three words as if he was marking a schedule. I don't think he quite got the message.
       The child inside him — and in each of us — knows. Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
       But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imaginations are stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise.
       The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder-child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey (through an exercise at the end of this chapter) to a real place in the imaginal realm.
       The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
       Play first, work later, the child that is with us will insist. The cautious, dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner child at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promise to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it we’ll fall in love with our work, because it will be our play.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Children Dancing on the Strand" by AE (George Russell)

Acts of creation

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.
    For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

Other habits of creative people:

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere.

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim.

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

Photo by RM: Creative soles at the Bloom School in Sarajevo

Why creativity matters

Three essential things about creativity and the human condition:

1.

Creativity, in the sense of the ability to adapt or innovate, is one of the twin engines of human evolution (the other being selection). As change continues to speed up in our lives and our world, we need the creative ability to adjust and adapt to the unexpected.

2.

When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or muse or daimon.  Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.  

3.

Creativity is healing.

The neural basis for high creativity – the multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other, not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – a new creation emerges. [1]

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creator remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of the child inside all of us.

The most important thing that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out. For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

Other habits of creative people, based on my own observation and experience:

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”. These may include walking in nature, swimming, doodling, taking naps, spending periods of relaxed attention in the liminal space of hypnagogia between sleep and awake.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere.

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim.

[1] Source: Nancy Andreasen, neuroscientist at University of Iowa, pioneer in brain imaging the neural paths of creativity

We'll discover what this means, experientially, in my creative writing retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at a dream location, Mosswood Hollow (think a cross between Hogwarts and Narnia) in a five-day residential retreat from May 20-24. And we will bring back gifts! 

Art: "Flutter of Swallows" by artist and dream teacher Karen Nell McKean. Karen is hosting a weekend workshop for me on the arts of Magical Dreaming and Kairomancy at her dream studio outside Madison Wisconsin on May 4-5.

A breathing towards the First World

A short poem by Rilke addresses the theme of what becomes of the dreams of childhood and the child self that is the dreamer. It is titled "Imaginary Career" (Imaginärer Lebenslauf) .Stephen Mitchell's translation goes as follows:

At first a childhood, limitless and free

of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.

Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery.

the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,

inflicts on others what he once went through.

Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,

he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.

Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart

a longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then from his place of ambush, God leapt out.

Mitchell's version does not quite satisfy me. Lust, which he translates as unconsciousness, means so much more. Edward Snow does better, in his version in the bilingual edition of the Uncollected Poems, when he calls it "unthinking joy".

Snow also has a better and more literal translation of a key phrase in the third stanza, about what is hidden in the grown-up heart (literally, the "constructed form", der errichteten Gestalt):

    a breathing towards the First, the Ancient

 The German original for this line is 

    ein Atemholen nach dem Ersten, Alten...

And here we have the sense of soul, of the possibility of anamnesis, of remembering what the soul knows. And of bringing home the magical child who remembers his home star. A "breathing towards", ein Atemholen...

As I linger on these words, I feel someone deep in me, a boy with freckles and a wooden sword, a love of tigers and brown rivers, breathing towards a blue star. 

Art: "Boy with a Wooden Sword" by Edmund Rode

We dream dreams of the child, and the child dreams of us

I often hear dreams from adults that sound like the products of a child's imagination. One dreamer is menaced by giants. She runs but can't get away - until Superman swoops down to rescue her. Another dreamer is entertained by a strange composite animal, a cross between a jolly pink pig and a hairless dog, with a strip of carpet instead of a tail.

     In such dreams, buildings and people around the dreamer often seem vastly larger than in regular life, as adults and cities might appear from the perspective of a young child. At the same time, the dreamer may find she has the ability to make herself greatly bigger or smaller, like Alice with the "Drink Me" bottles.
     I wonder whether such child-like dreams really are the dreams of the child within the dreamer. They may be returning memories of dreams in early life. They may also be a direct link to the inner child, providing a chance to bring more of her energy, joy and imagination into current life. They may even be a bridge to connect with the child in her Now time, which is past history for the adult except when released from the constraints of linear time, as in dreaming.
    I have given happy examples thus far, but the dreams of the child may of course be filled with challenge and drenched in fear. Those menacing giants may represent abusive adults and authority figures the child can't handle, and Superman is not always available. Yet when the bridge to the child in her own Now time is open, we can slip across it, to offer support and mentoring that may be desperately needed. We can help to provide the heroes our child selves want to be dreaming of. 

    I know this: we can travel across time, and we can play mentor and counselor to a younger self, or receive help and guidance from a wiser older self. At the very least, when we reach to that younger self, we can offer the assurance that however much he is suffering, he or she will make it through.
    We dream dreams of the child, and the child dreams of us.

Art: "Jumping Rope" by A.E. (George Russell)

Drawing down our most potent muse, the magical child

“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves,” said Carl Jung. An earnest man at one of my lectures once asked me to summarize what I consider essential practice. I said, “Remember to play.” He carefully wrote down those three words as if he was marking a schedule. I don't think he quite got the message.
      The child inside him — and in each of us — knows. Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
       But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imaginations are stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise.
       The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder-child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a journey to a real place in the imaginal realm. Sometimes I ask workshop members to picture a path that winds back to the place where they can find their magical child. Maybe the path has been blocked by the rubble of adult life, by thickets of doubt. I suggest taking a broom, or a brush-hog, to clear all obstructions away..
       The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
       Play first, work later, the child that is with us will insist. In the courses and playshops I lead, I often invite participants to get down on the floor and draw their dreams with crayons, and to get up and turn them into spontaneous theater and performance. Our inner children come closer when we play like this.
       Play first, work later. The cautious, dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner child at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promise to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it we’ll fall in love with our work, because it will be our play.

Stephen Nachmanovitch reminds us in his book Free Play that "our inner child is our most potent muse." Here's a scene from my life as ally of this kind of muse: 

In a room overlooking Spring Street in New York's colorful SoHo district, I am drumming to help twenty-four dreamers call up the right dream to play with — or play with them — on a wintry Saturday morning. Everyone has sketch paper and crayons, because the first thing we'll do is to turn the dream that comes up into an instant drawing. Adult kindergarten is great. It brings out the child in each of us who is a natural creator.    
     At the end of the drumming, I rough out my own picture. It shows a figure whose head and upper body are those of a giant salmon, and whose lower body is that of a woman. She is the Salmon Speaker. She has stepped through a holo-screen to lecture a council of world leaders on their responsibilities to Water, and all that lives in Water. She is a being from Dreamland, the future society of my deeper dreaming, in which dreamers speak for the planet.    
     Other pictures are bursting to life all around me. It's time for introductions. I ask people to introduce themselves briefly by stating their name, their intention in coming to the workshop (“Writing from Dreams”) and the title — just the title — of their dream pictures. I spin the drumstick to show us where to begin, inviting the play of coincidence. When coincidence is in play, a woman in the circle said to me earlier, “you feel the fingers of the universe are on you.”    
      Some of the dream titles are so juicy and inviting that I pause the introductions more than once to have people meditate on a phrase or simply write a few lines from it, jotting down the first things that it releases in their minds. One of those irresistible titles is, “The Child's Other World”.  
      The phrase transports all of us into places of memory and imagination, into an enchanted apple orchard or through a green door no one else can see. In the child's other world, one of our participants wrote, there is “the joy of touching, smelling, feeling, playing with, hiding in the sun-hot dark dirt between the strawberry plants of our big backyard, alone and breathing in the tangy grass.”    
      In that other world, one writer found herself “floating on the clouds, very light, dissolving, feeling lifted into the sky.” Another found herself stepping through a dream door, “exiting a spaceship onto a planet where it is night, there are trees and hills on the horizon but in front of me only a cleared space. To my left I can turn to a swingset, as yet motionless, and to my right is a stationary park bench. Everything is blue, including the light.”    
     In the child's other world, one woman played  “imaginary chess in the park”. Another found the other world of children “is seen through the kaleidoscope of their eyes. The patterns and colors transfix them to the magical possibilities of the coming day. Flights of fancy, rainbows and dreamscapes interweave seamlessly into the sidewalks, trees and buildings around them.”    
     For me, the Child’s Other World is a world within this one. Its cloudy skies are the sheets I have pulled over my head as I lie in bed, aged nine or so. Grown-ups can't understand that the world inside the sheets is bigger than the one outside.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss, Published by New World Library.

Art: AE (George Russell) "The Bathers"

Play first, work later (and delight your inner child)

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.

     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise.

     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.

     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Adapted from ActiveDreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Art: "Bathers" by George William Russell (AE).

Advice from your best life coach: Play first, work later

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.

     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise.

     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.

     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play

Adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing (c) Robert Moss

The Boys in the Back

I have made a deal with my Boy Roberts, the ones who want to write and make worlds with and through me. Here's how that came about this week, in my creative writing retreat at Mosswood Hollow.

They are rocking the car. Or maybe it’s the car that is rocking them, messing up their plan for the world.
    They have created a world in miniature with maps and drawings hung on a wire, and model figures and dioramas arranged on the floor. They are sitting with their backs to the driver, who has his back to them as he grips the wheel, driving in the direction he has chosen. The passenger area is quite large, like the inside of a London taxi.
    The boys are young, between six and twelve. They have a whole thriller plot figured out that may involve a War of the Worlds scenario, secret agents, a grand conspiracy, and lots of danger and derring-do. As they move their toys and hang things on the line or fold them or take them off, the outside world changes. For the man at the wheel, this is only a distraction and a fantasy. For the boys it is quite real.
     When the car hits another bumpy patch on the road, traveling much too fast for the potholes, the boy’s world is shaken violently, which means that terrible things could happen in the larger world around them, because the two are intimately connected. In fact they are one world. Doesn’t the man at the wheel understand this yet?
     Can’t he slow down or stop and make time to enjoy the fabulous view from the cliffs near the road? Isn’t there someone who can tell him to listen to the boys in the back and join their game of making a world?    
    I have a notion who the boys are, and who the man at the wheel must be. I step into the middle of the road, commanding him to stop.
    Reluctantly, the driver complies, complaining that he doesn’t have time for this. He has plans, and a schedule to complete. I lean in the window, telling him to turn around and listen to the boys in the back.
    “Who are you?”
    “We are the world makers,” they chorus.          
     “So what is in your world?” The man sounds weary and skeptical.
     “There is the Bear, of course,” says Six. “He’s the one who sits at the gate to the Color Worlds eating grapes. He’s the one who tied a red cord around your waist, and the waist of your sister, so you could always find your way back from your adventures – or be pulled out when those adventures got too scary.”
      “There is Pondicherry,” says Nine. “You can’t really have forgotten. He is the swimming tiger who was with you when you swam five miles in the Melbourne pool even though you had been really, really sick. He likes you to speak in French, even though your French is terrible, and he especially likes it when you lie on his favorite sofa and tell stories about him.”
       “There is the Pilot,” says Twelve. “You were in contact with him every time you got on your bike and put on that aviator’s fleece-lined leather cap with the ear flaps to ride your bike to school in Canberra on wintry mornings.”
     I am at the wheel now, ready to hear the deal the boys in the back have for me.
    “We’ll help you with your book,” they tell me. “On condition that you work with us every day on our book.” This doesn’t have to feel like work at all. A drawing, a cartoon, a set of little panel sketches like a draft of a page on a comic book.
     I start right away. I draw a boy looking through the open door of a bathroom. Inside there is nothing except cat litter boxes, lots of them, arranged on the floor. In my sketch, they look a lot like open graves.
     I write the caption:

He wasn’t scared until he went to the bathroom and found it was full of cat boxes. Nine of them, the same number as the women in the library.
    A bit too long for the comic book page I produce, so I slim it down. The other panels are scenes taken straight from another of my dreams.

    Memo to the man at the wheel, for forgetful days:

Listen to the boys in the back. They are the world makers.