The importance of doing things before you're ready

As I work on a new book, I am reminded of one of the basic rules of life: If we wait until we are fully prepared in order to do something, we may never get it done. Perfection is not available in our human condition. It's important to do things before we think we are ready.
    A case in point, mined from my own journals in the period when I was working on my book The Secret History of Dreaming: 

I've spent the past few days reading and sketching my way into a chapter about Jung and Pauli. I have been prey to both the temptations and the performance anxiety associated with this theme.

    One of the temptations is to wait until I have read or re-read the 18 volumes of Jung's Collected Works (I own nine of these volumes, plus five volumes of selections from the others) and his memoirs and letters, and at least half a dozen of the biographies, and a dozen of the studies of his approach to synchronicity (all of which are also on my shelves or my desk). 
    There’s also a strong temptation to wait until I have found someone to explain Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, and Riemann Surfaces, and Violation of Parity and the Fine Structure Constant to me, and exactly where and why he differed with Einstein and (on another front) with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen School, and the whole debate over symmetry - and until I have found someone else to disinter and translate Pauli's full correspondence with Aniela Jaffe and Marie-Louise von Franz. Oh yes, and of course to delay getting on with this chapter until I have hunted down the text of Schopenhauer's Essay on Spirit-Seeing, which turns out to have been a critical influence on Pauli's approach to dreams and reality and - after he pushed Jung to read or re-read it - on Jung as well (but is almost completely unavailable in English today and which I have - so far - been unable to locate online).

    At the very least, I realize, I want to go through the entire Jung-Pauli correspondence yet again (and the 400 Pauli dreams summarized and analyzed previously in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) page by page, checking every reference, grounding every allusion in the personal and general history of their lives and their time, making sure I have missed nothing and understood everything.

    The performance anxiety centers on knowing that I understand Pauli’s physics no better than Jung, and do not have the advantage of having Pauli around to give me personal tutorials. And on the fact that there are a thousand Jungians (maybe many more) around ready to howl at any misrepresentation of the master.

    There is only one satisfactory response to such temptations and concerns.

    The only recourse is to get on and write the chapter NOW, regardless.

Poetry comes from flooding

 

Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful but difficult Impasse of the Angels evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving.
    “Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release.
     The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.
     He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it.
    Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: "The river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it." She told him that he had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter poetical ‘words.” [1]
    I am reminded of the counsel Anais Nin gave to a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer: “Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”[2]
    I am reminded of my own big dream of a flood, one of those that dream classifiers might call a watershed dream. I dreamed I was walking a deer I called Bear as I might walk my dog in the park. We came to an open plain with a view to a distant horizon. The earth was reddish and looked bare. I glanced to my right and saw a tremendous wall of water rushing towards where we stood. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy.
    Of course, I wanted to go back inside the dream, to enter its mysteries and to see what would happen if I managed to ride the great wave. I managed to do this in an operation I call dream reentry, in which we use a dream or personal image that has energy as the portal for a conscious journey, which may be field and focused by shamanic drumming. I did not need drumming to go back inside this dream; it was calling me.
     My animal companion was not mysterious. I have long been closely connected both to the deer and the bear as shamanic allies. I was amused that in the dream I called the deer Baer, but this, for me, simply brought into focus the healing aspects of the connection and was not a [particular focus for the lucid dream journey I was going to make. I wanted to catch the great wave.  
     I lay back in an easy chair, closed my eyes, and willed myself back inside the dream. I found myself in ancient Egypt, in Egyptian garb. I was surveying the Nile at the time of the  inundation, when the great river rose to feed the thirsty earth, bringing the crops. As the waters spilled, I saw papyrus plants in great abundance bursting from the earth, which was now black and loamy. I felt deep in my body that I was being invited to enter a fresh period of abounding creative energy. This proved to be the case. A new book, new poems, new projects poured from me and through me. Life was poetry even when I was writing in prose. Poetry comes from flooding.

 

 References

1. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.265]

2. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin. Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (New York: Mariner Books 1972)

 

Writing while the blue sand runs

 

 

When I approach a major writing project, I sometimes notice I have decades and decades of journals and drafts and sketches that hold relevant material. They are alluring but perilous. I can get trapped and enmeshed in them, like a tomb raider in an Indiana Jones movie when the roof of the underground temple starts coming down. I need to find how to get out of my self-made literary necropolis and write fresh words.

I often fall back on a practice I lead in all my creative writing retreats: timed writing.  I have found it's incredibly productive to tell people to do something in a very short period of time. When I say a short time, I mean five or fifteen minutes. I find that fifteen minutes is a terrific space in which to get something down.

For my own writing practice at home, I have a marvelous assistant. It is a quarter hourglass. It runs for fifteen minutes. I found it online. It has blue sand in it. Blue is my favorite color. Whether I feel ready or not, if I have fifteen minutes, I will upend the hourglass and start writing. This is especially good to do when I do not feel ready, maybe utterly uninspired. I write anyway. And I stop when the sand runs out. 

My hope is that I pretty soon I’ll be writing consecutively in these swift sessions so I may have the whole draft of a book, or at least a chapter or essay, if I keep doing this for a few weeks. I know that if my fingers go fast enough, as the sand runs down, there’ll be no time for my inner editor and my inner critics to take command of my thoughts. Some days I have no clue about what I am doing or what I want ti to come of this. That’s okay.  I write for that quarter hour anyway and sometimes something wonderful or terrifying or both breaks through – a bigger story that has been stalking me, the soul of a book I had not planned, a trickster spirit who wants to remind me that play is always the thing. 

While the blue sand runs, I do not look at those notes and digital files and piles of books and folders. I keep my eyes on the page I am writing, on paper or screen. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I'm not looking at old drafts or sketches. I'm not looking at my journals full of treasures though they are. I'm just writing. I might be drawing from my memories of things that have happened in my life and things that I've written about in some form somewhere else, but I'm not looking at anything. . I'm not struggling with the old furnishings of the mind. I'm writing while the blue sand runs.

I often say that creativity requires us to play first, work later. If you have heard me say that, you may object, “What if you don't feel like doing it?” My response is: however you feel before you get into the swim, doing something for fifteen minutes is no big deal. Make it a game. Play at writing, at being a writer. For quarter of an hour, do what writers do.

Have you heard what William Faulkner said to the wannabee writers who flocked to Ole Miss for the first and last creative writing workshop he ever gave? He looked at the eager faces in the lecture room and said, , "So you want to be writers?”. When the cheers had died down, he said, “So write." And he left the room. 

[from a guidance session I gave at a writing retreat] 

For a sample of raw product from one of my personal 15-minute sessions see "You are in the afterlife now"

 

 

In praise of bricolage

I've given up trying to translate the marvelous French word bricolage, sometimes rendered as "tinkering". It's about putting together bits and pieces on a whim, rather than approaching a project as a solid, stolid work of engineering. It's about following oneiric logic rather than plans and structures.

     Claude Lévi-Strauss,who made the word at home in French, found that this approach is central to the making of myths and the workings of "the savage mind". In his celebrated book La pensée sauvage he observed that the bricoleur employs "devious means". His game is "always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."[1]

     Found objects, junk shops, storage basements, words overheard from strangers...these are materials for bricolage. So are your journals. I love to go through old journals plucking out curious and shiny things and arranging them on fresh pages. I was encouraged to learn that this was a regular practice for Thoreau, a dedicated journal keeper. He liked to forage through old journals plucking out promising bits and pieces - observations in nature, quotes from his reading, dreams and reflections. He copied excerpts and married them up as fresh drafts. It became his habit “to work back over his journals…to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier journal work,measuring, weighing, culling and sorting his materials…taking up earlier threads, reweaving and combining them.”[1]

     For any writer, as for Thoreau, it opens treasuries of material and above all it supports the writing habit. Playing around with old notes removes the terror of the blank page. When you dip into an old journal, you are never at a loss for a theme. The simple processes of selection, arrangement and retitling will fire the imagination. Before you know it, you’ll be in the midst of writing something new. However, the practice of journaling from journals is not only for writers. It is a marvelous tool for self-observation, for life navigation, and for constructing a personal encyclopedia of symbols.  

     Ah, but what is best is the pure bricolage. I might start working through old journals with a specific agenda, using the search engine to pull up items from my digital files, arranging materials in orderly folders, setting production schedules. Then I am distracted or enchanted by a note I made after a concert:

Barber's Adagio for Strings: The sad and lovely waves of sound carried me effortlessly into vision: of an island in the mist, of the grace of swimming swans, and the loneliness of a solitary swan, of a bright winged being towering above the many-colored waters. Meeting me halfway in the crossing, the swan prince made me know what is required to be enfolded in his knowing. I remember how Aengus, dream god and love god, took the form of a swan.

or a quote that stuns me awake:

Plotinus on the personal guardian: "“Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active…Plato truly said that ‘we choose our guardian’, for, by the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our life.’

or a dream of any kind, calling me into fields of memory, mystery and delight:

The Thumbelina Exchange: A young woman has mastered the art of entering another universe by becoming incredibly small.This may have been intentional; she may have wished herself out of her life situation, at least for a fling. Not clear if she is able to return at will.

Soon the pleasure of simply playing with my finds as they come up and come back, takes over. I forget my agendas, and play with the pieces that catch my eye, arranging and fitting them together without expecting them to snap into prearranged place like a jigsaw puzzle. I don't count on it, I don't try to program it, but I am open to finding again that it is in these moments of dickering and tinkering and playing without thought of consequences that fresh and unexpected creation bursts through, as I once saw an apple tree rise from an abandoned core in a heap of compost.  

References

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962)

2. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)

Pressfield’s War of Art, and the Muse

  

I was sent a copy of a little book on creativity by Steven Pressfield, the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, and found it so delicious I devoured it in a single sitting. Some readers may have trouble with the military metaphor suggested by the title, The War of Art but no writer will fail to recognize those days when the forces resisting the creative process seem to have laid minefields and blown up bridges.

Pressfield divides his little book into three even smaller books.

Book One is devoted to what blocks and derails the creative process. Pressfield itemizes many ways of self-sabotage, from booze to procrastination, from giving in to family needs to confusing the urgent with the important (for which the remedy is always to do the important stuff first). These are all activities of what he calls Resistance. I rather wish he had picked a different name (Sabotage could work) since, with the great big capital R, the word Resistance brings up thoughts of the French Resistance and we surely do not want to go to war with anything like that. But let’s soldier on.. Pressfield offers a provocative list of the ambitions and endeavors that stir up the strongest Resistance from the little everyday self. These include any creative undertaking in any field, any action that requires moral courage, any entrepreneurial venture, and any effort to embark on new learning or clean out old habits and addictions.

Pressfield is absolutely correct when he says that for writers the problem is not writing but sitting down to write. He insists that the project we most resist is the one we most need to do. I suspect he is right about this too. Our deepest fears (to paraphrase Rilke) are the dragons guarding our deepest treasures.

If it’s really helpful to see the War of Art as a military campaign (Pressfield insists on this to the point of urging us to become Marines, with a calling to “miserable” conditions) let’s observe that frontal assault, as in war, can be self-defeating or suicidal. Flank attacks and diversionary tactics may work better, if there is indeed an enemy on the field of battle. Get around him, divide his forces, distract him, and then press your attack. In tackling a book project, I find I often do best by appearing to ride off in a completely different direction – for example, by devoting hours to seemingly unrelated research or posting at my online forums - only to change course and take the enemy from behind.

Book Two is devoted to becoming a pro, and contains much good stuff. Amateurs play for the game, pros play for keeps. Pressfield gives very practical counsel on bringing to the creative project some of the same habits that are required in workaday life: you turn up, you spend the necessary hours at the workplace, you don’t call in sick or depressed or with a family emergency or a need to bar crawl every day. You make a date with your muse and you keep it. He has a lovely quote from Somerset Maugham, who was asked whether he waited until he was inspired before he wrote, or wrote according to schedule. Maugham replied that he was fortunate to be inspired at precisely nine o’clock every morning.

Book Three is about how bringing through a creative project involves engaging the muse, the daimon, the genius. Pressfield describes how he borrowed from a friend the practice of saying aloud the opening words of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a great idea, but there are better versions than the old T.E.Lawrence (yes, Lawrence of Arabia) translation that Pressfield quotes. I’m going to borrow his idea, but recast it with the aid of the 1961 Robert Fitzgerald translation (you may wish to compare the fine 1996 translation by Robert Fagles).

The poet begins the Odyssey by invoking the creative spirit: 

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story 

It is the story of a wanderer, a “man of many ways” (polytropos) who was “harried for years on end” after he plundered the sacred places of Troy. His homecoming was delayed, within sight of Ithaca, when his men killed and feasted on the sacred cattle of the sun. We read in this that we must do the work for a higher purpose than filling our bellies.The key thing is to engage a larger power.

Borrowing from the Fitzgerald version, Homer’s invocation of the Muse could be simplified as follows: 

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.

Tell us in our time, lift the great song again. 

Note that the Muse here (mousa) is not yet job-specific; the early Greeks did not divide up musing functions between the nine nymphs familiar to the Renaissance. At the oldest level of the Muse cult, there appear to have been three, not nine, Muses and their names (as preserved in Pausanias) mean Voice, Practice, and Memory. Who would not want those allies in pursuit of a creative project? They are irresistible.

Art: Edmond Aman-Jean, "Hesiod Listening to the Muse", c.1890

The Death's Head Dominatrix Joins Me on the Plane

 

I had been leading a creative writing retreat at magical Mosswood Hollow, a private retreat center in a red cedar forest eats of Seattle where I have led adventures for many years. Too goose myself to do deliver some fresh pages myself, I started writing a bunch of stories within a frame story. The frame story was that a writer has made a deal with Death according to which he will be allowed to live only as long as he goes on producing stories that entertain Death. Familiar? Certainly. It's the story of Scheherazade and I felt I had been living it for many years. 

Within the frame story I started banging out tales that now came to me. One of them featured a Roman centurion in the time just after the crucifixion. His girlfriend was a Phoenician witch who was good with dreams. 

After closing the retreat, I boarded a plane at Seattle airport to fly home. As always, I was curious to see what unfolded in the Bardo of air travel.  A plane is not a bad place to talk to strangers and to chance an encounter. You have a somewhat protected situation. It’s limited in terms of time and space. You can talk to someone and never see them again. You can cut off a conversation if you don’t like it. It's a contained environment. On this particular plane ride, however, the chance encounter did not feel like chance and was not safe at all. , 

When I took my aisle set the two seats between me and the window were vacant. Then a very tell woman came strutting down the aisle. She was made taller by her high-heeled black boots and her top hat. She wore black leather over a bustier. When she sat down next to me, after parking a pudgy little man by the window, I saw her gloves. They had the fingers cut out and huge death's heads on their backs. 

She ordered crème de menthe. Told by the flight attendant that the airline did not carry that, she ordered  a double vodka. She craned her head, inspected the cabin, and introduced herself to me by saying. "I like this flight. All the seats are full. Actuarially, if the plane is going to crash, twenty percent of the seats will be empty."

She sucked her vodka. I said, "You look like a magician." 

"I can make magic." she told me. "You could say that spankings are my friends."

I got the hint. The lady with the death's head gloves was dominatrix. Not my scene. The conversation that followed was staccato, sudden gusts followed by long pauses.

She leaned into me and asked, "Do you think the dead appear to us in our dreams?" 

I had told her nothing about myself. I said, "Absolutely."

"Oh, good. My dead husband showed up in my dreams last week. He was shot in the face in a diner in Seattle last year. He was in the papers. He was a musician. He turned up by my bedside and he said, ‘I’ve got a really cool job.’ He said, 'I’ve got a job doing music and special effects for dreams that are being produced for people living in this world.' What do you think of that?" 

"I think it's entirely possible." And a fascinating story.  

Conversation lagged for a bit. She ordered more vodka. Then she stared at me and said, "I would love to read a story from the point of view of Jezebel." 

This came with no context. I was trying to remember what the Bible says about Jezebel when she added, "Those Phoenician witches were very good with dreams."

I was astounded. She spoke as if she knew what I had been writing earlier that day, in the spirit of Scheherazade. Was her dead husband whispering in her ear?

Conversation continued like this, billowing and lulling, until she addressed me as follows: "I like crows and ravens." 

"Of course, you do," I said. 

"Yeah. Do you know what the collective noun for a group of crows or ravens is?" 

"Well, it’s a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens." I was pleased with myself for knowing both terms.

She sniffed. "Everybody knows that. There’s another collective noun for both groups of birds. Do you know what it is?"

"You are going to tell me."

"Yes I am. It’s a storytelling of crows or a storytelling of ravens. Do you know why?"

 "You’re going to tell me that too."

 "I saw this once. I saw a gathering of crows, a storytelling of crows gathered around a storyteller crow. He was doing his best but he was an unsatisfactory storyteller because when he was finished they pecked him to death." 

Did I want a little edge for my writing efforts? I got it on that flight. I later expanded this episode into the lead story in my collection Mysterious Realities. This is the simple, unvarnished account of what happened on that night flight from Seattle to Chicago.

I left out of the longer version, "A Storytelling of Crows", the final incident on that flight. As we landed, the little man who had been parked in the window seat roused from his long nap. 

"This Homer," the dominatrix introduced her companion. 

I could not resist saying, "Enjoy your odyssey, Homer."

Homer rubbed his eyes and said, "All I want is a bowling alley."

"A bowling alley?"

"Yep, a one-lane bowling alley. Something to do when you get old."

As scary, in its way, as the storytelling of crows. 

You can read the expanded version of this episode, "A Storytelling of Crows" in Mysterious Realities: Tales of a Dream Traveler in the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photos by RM

 

The most important book I will ever read

I have kept a dream journal for many decades and I know it is the most important book  that I will ever read. I say this as a voracious reader with a personal library of nearly 14,000 books.
    My journal is my personal encyclopedia of symbols. It is my user's manual for living a fruitful life and choosing wisely between alternate possible futures that my traveling self visits every night. It is my scientific data log for incidents of precognition, telepathy and clairsentience, and for transpersonal experiences in which, for example, two or more people are engaged in the same dream activities. It is my atlas of the multiverse, my magical diary and the core of my personal mythology. It commemorates the nightly screening of gods, archetypes and daimones.
     It is starter dough for creative expression. It is the first and sometimes the best draft of pages that will appear in my books or be shared as stories in my lectures and classes. It is a book of clues, full of curious words and intriguing details that will send me off on research assignments.   

    Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep; it is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. So my journal not only contains reports from sleep dreams, but also from shamanic journeys and special moments of synchronicity when we become vividly aware that ordinary life may be a waking dream. I take particular care to record the impressions that come in the liminal space between sleep and awake. The most important spiritual dialogues of my life have unfolded from contact with inner guides who communicate in this space, and some of my most thrilling adventures in lucid dream travel have taken off from here. 

     My journal reveals continuous lives that I seem to be leading in parallel worlds where I made different life choices. It shows me threads of connection between my present dramas and those of counterpart personalities living in other places and times, and helps me to pull gently on the web, to bind or release. My journal holds up a magic mirror to my attitudes and actions, offering course correction and restoring my inner compass. It helps me to track my progress in the practice of continuity of consciousness. This involves retaining witness perspective and awareness of choice in two or more realities simultaneously, as you cycle through states of sleep, dream, sleep-wake, waking dream and more.
     I may write my first reports of the day with a pencil or a fountain pen, in a beautiful bound journal with archival quality paper that invites me to sketch and to color as well. As soon as possible, however, I'll transcribe my reports into a digital data base. I date and title each report, so I have an instant chronological index. Saving my documents in Word gives me a search engine so if I want to track a theme or a name over all the years - "black dog", "Mircea Eliade", "HG" [hypnagogic] - all I have to do is type it in the box and all the relevant entries are there before me.
     No doubt everything is recorded somewhere - more likely in nonlocal mind than the basement of the personal subconscious - but it is essential (and can be wonderful creative fun) to develop searchable logs of this kind over time. They become the most important scientific data (in the sense of state-specific science, adequate to the field under investigation) in this area that we will ever attain.
     How much to record? My feelings will guide me on the urgency and importance of a dream - and indeed of whatever enter my field of perception - and how much detail I should include in my journal reports. On most days, I don't try record everything I remember from my dreams, just as I don't write down what I ate for breakfast or how many times my dog relieved himself in the park. A map as big as a country is no longer a map, as in the Borges story.
     There are limits to how much even the most dedicated dream journal-keeper can bring back from a night in the multiverse. On some days, my inner guidance is to write down whatever I remember as soon as possible, and let further writing and pattern recognition emerge as I do that. This works really well when I start by drawing something from the dream. On other days, my guidance is to forego journaling altogether in favor of simply writing with the energy and elements my dreams and hypnagogic experiences have given me.

    Some of the things that happen in Dreamland and stay in Dreamland have enduring effects even when we are amnesiac about what happened. 

So you want to be a writer

I have a few simple rules for the practice of writing:

1. Keep a journal. Write in it every day - your dreams, your thoughts, something you saw in the street or in the clouds, something you read. Keep your journal secret. This is just for you.No judgment, no critics or editors, no consequences.

2. Read every day. Go on reading binges. Appreciate books that are less than perfect, because they will help you to see what you may truly be able to do better. Notice what grabs you and what leaves you yawning.This will help you recognize your natural genre.

3. Write for a short and specified time every day. 15 minutes is great, 5 minutes will do. I time myself with a quarter hourglass. I write until the blue sand runs out, and sometimes for a few minutes more, but it is important tp respect the time limit. This practice is different from keeping a journal. Now you are writing The Book. You may be clueless about the shape of the book to begin with, but if a story wants to come through, it will reveal its form and its dimensions.

When your project has taken shape, and you are ready to set deadlines and send out proposals characters, do this:

4. Apply the work habits that worked for you in the past.What work habits and schedules have made you most productive in any field in the past? Have you done best on a daily 9-5 schedule,or on wild overnight rushes to meet a deadline?Do you do better in solitude or among workmates or with a partner? Apply those past habits to your writing project.

5. Shhhhhhhhh. Don't waste energy and lose magic by talking to much about that book or script you are working on. If being in a writing group suits you, well and good. However, don't talk to the world at large about what you are doing or not doing. And avoid, like the plague, the feedback felons who bring you down instead of saying what you need to hear from a creative friend, which is More, More!

I am about to publish my 26th book, Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through Twelve Secrets of Imagination. I am still learning what it means to be a writer, and what risks it is necessary to take and what habits it is necessary to grow or reinforce to bring something truly new into the world. Yes, I am writing new books, different from anything I have published before.No, I cannot say any more because of rule #5.

A Writer's Way

I read somewhere that William Faulkner was persuaded, late in life to give a writer's work shop at his alma mater, Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. He turned up and said to packed classroom, "So you want to write." Nods and cries of assent. "Then write," the great novelist told them. And he turned on his heel and went home.

I have often thought that Faulkner got this pretty much right. However, when I consider what works for me, and try to offer some counsel to others, I notice that there is a little more that may be said, although I start pretty much where Faulkner left off.

1. Show Up!. Make time to write something EVERY DAY. What writers do is write.

2. Journal! I am certain, after publishing 25 books, that my journal is the most important book I will ever write, and one of the most important I will ever read. The act of keeping a journal is a workout for the writing muscles. It frees you from inhibitions if you make this your secret book and write in it without concern for consequences and the opinions or others. You'll find that a dream report, an observation of something seen in the street, a snatch of overheard conversation or a quote from another author that sparked something from you will give you starter dough for your own compositions and even a first draft.

3.Read! As much as possible, all over the gamut. Notice which genres call you most strongly. Maybe one or more of them is you natural genre, or maybe it's pure entertainment or a way of escape,though it could prove to be both. Borges, the master of gnomic, gnostic tales of the fantastic and surreal, loved traditional detective stories - and also borrowed from their puzzle forms in some of his fiction. I am creatively triggered in my own writers by authors who tackle themes (in fiction or nonfiction) that have appeal strongly to me, but delivered flawed work.This gives me confidence to enter that field in the hope I can do better.

4. Set a Time Limit (until you are on a roll and simply can't stop). I have a quarter-hour glass,whose blue sand runs out after 15 minutes. I use this often in the approach run to producing a new book.And I actually try to get up from my desk after 15 minutes. This often means stopping in mid-paragraph. Fine.When I return to my text, I don't have to face a blank page.I know exactly where to pick up.

5. Sideline the Editor. Don't judge or evaluate a draft until it's done. And do not let others play editor or critic. 

6. Avoid Feedback Felons. Stay away from anyone who gives you less than positive encouragement or saddles you with wrong or premature expectations or is simply jealous because you are creating and they are not.

7. Keep Your Fingers Walking. Don't agonize over trying to perfect any part of what you are writing until you have sketched out the whole thing.

8. Relax - and Pay Attention. The flow state is one of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. You are stretching yourself, and your ability to receive and bring through, without forcing anything on the level of the control freak in the ego. If you're stuck, put on some music, take a shower or a swim - getting in flow with water always helps - take a walk for five unscheduled minutes and see what the world gives you.

9. Gag the Demon of Expectations. You want fame and fortune from this, or at least some respect from your friends? Fine. But don't let your expectations damn your performance. Write for the heck of it, have a good time doing this for its own sake.

10. Put Yourself Where the Big Story Can Grab You. Writing, at its core, is about releasing a story. Never forget that the Big story is hunting you. The whole art of telling it is to keep moving - further and further from the tame and settled lands - until you get deep enough into the bush for the Big story to jump on you. Then everything will be different, and fabulous. Your dreams can take you there.

11. Entertain Your Genius. You may have various writing partners, but the one that matters is the big one, the creative spirit the Romans called the genius. The more you are willing to give yourself to your writing for its own sake, to dare something new, the closer you draw this guiding power and its limitless energy. And that changes everything.

12. If You Must Work to Deadline, Make Sure It's an All-But-Impossible Deadline. Our genius loves us best - and helps us most - when we take on the greatest challenges, and play the game hardest.

You don't give a lion a haircut

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot.
    Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning light, I felt deeply satisfied, the kind of satisfied when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

I will have the pleasure on embodying this dream at two beautiful physical locations where I am leading my 5-day residential retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year: at Mosswood Hollow near Seattle in May and at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic in August.

photo: Path of Magic at Mosswood Hollow by RM

A place to write from (Red Ink)

Write from the place that is raw

from the night when you lost your skin.
Write of the time in the war-torn city
when your heart was a quivering bird in your palm
and the blood pool kept filling, and you knew
no doctor could heal this wound
though the world would end if you failed
to keep the wounded lover alive for three days more.

Write from the night you wished yourself dead
and spirit flew from your heart, winged by your desire,
down to the lightless lands of the dead
that no one escapes without help.
Write from the day when, incredibly,
there was enough of you topside
to bribe the ferryman with the ribcage boat
and carry home the part of you that married Death.

Remember the promises you made her:

"You'll never be hurt again." "Every day you'll make poetry."

Write from the night you could not keep those promises
and had to hold the young lover in you by force,
rough as a jailer's armlock, soft as lambskin,
when she thought the one you were losing now
was the one she lost before. And when your heart
breaks again, hold her fast, willing a greater power
to embrace and join you, and write from that.

Dip your pen in the blood pool. This is the time for red ink.

- This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming. 

Art: Georgia O'Keefe's Red Poppy

A Master of the Third Eye

“You know what a master is like,” she cautioned me.

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s as likely to whack you as to talk to you.”

I climbed the last steps to the master’s hermitage resolved not to submit to any slap-in-the-face treatment.

I found him with his feet in a tub of hot water. Steam rose and the air was pleasantly scented with mountain herbs as one of his handmaidens palpated his feet. I was curious to see whether she would dry them with her lustrous black hair, that fell to the floor.

“Move the chest,” he directed me.

I contemplated the great iron-banded box without enthusiasm.

“Where?”

He indicated the far corner.

I half-lifted, half-carried the heavy trunk to the place he indicated, wondering what he kept in it.

“Now bring it back. And don’t drag it. Pick it up.”

I felt the veins bulge on my forehead as I struggled to carry out these instructions. I nearly made it back. Then the trunk slid from my grip, landing painfully on my left foot.

The master waited until I had stopped howling before he spoke again. “Why do you come to me?”

“Master, I come to you because I wish to see.”

“Then why are your pig eyes open?”

“Master?”

I realized, at that moment, that the master’s eyes were closed. I understood that I was to close my own.

“Closer,” he commanded.

I felt the stir of movement. I heard the swish of the loose silk of his garment, and pictured his arm swinging back, fist clenched. Here it comes.

I intended to duck the blow, but something kept me in place, on my knees in front of him. What was that buzzing sound? It made me think of a bee, trapped behind glass. It came closer.

I felt burning pain as something pierced me at the third eye, like a drill bit. Immediately the girl was at my side, soothing my forehead with an ointment that smelled like yoghurt.

When she left off, there was absolute stillness in the cabin. Then I heard the soft slap of water from the footbath.

I opened my eyes. There was no change in the scene. The black-haired girl squatted at the master’s feet, as before. I felt no surge of enlightenment. I did notice that one of the master’s eyes was now open. Above and between his closed eyelids, it fixed me with its blue light, cold and unwinking.

I wrote this little story during a 15-minute timed exercise while leading an adventure in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming". It appears here unedited. The starter dough was a card I drew in a literary version of my Coincidence Card Game that included the words "third eye."I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" again this year at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Seattle, from May21-25 and in a green paradise near Česká Skalice  in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Image: "Watching" by Zen-Master on DeviantArt.

Borrowed lines

Writers enjoy the thrill of petty larceny. Though I don’t recommend grand theft, I encourage people at the start of my creative writing programs to borrow lines, images and plot ideas from each other. At the beginning of one of my 5-day adventures in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at Mosswood Hollow, we accomplished this through a card game.
    I had everybody write a summary of a dream or a story or just a few good lines on one side of an index card. Then we took turns to pull cards from the deck and make up more of a story or script from whatever was dealt to us, pretending that the card we drew contained our own material. We also agreed that whatever was read in front of the group would be common property.
     This provided great starter dough! Here is a cycle of seven little verses I wrote that morning, riffing on seven of the cards that were shared.

Borrowed Lines

1
Turn Off

Turning, turning. They kept her turning
till she didn’t know which way to turn.
So she turned harder, the other way
and became cyclone. She carried their houses
and banks, their laptops and diamond rings
and every sure thing in the swirl of her rage
until she turned all of them off.

2

Cat People

What you most hate is what you will become
unless you agree that
what you most fear is what you must do.

3

Worker bees

On the porch, a few of us are fanning ourselves.
Most are torpid in sunlight, in a heat stupor.
Until one of us rouses and flies up counter-clockwise

and we rise to follow, filling the air with our hum.

4

Breakfast Time

I love the spring bunny in a shaft of sunlight
on the dew-glistening grass, sweet and soft.
I drop from the sky in vertical descent,
talons exquisitely precise. Breakfast time.

5

All Roads

To tell you I love you is to love myself.
I must breathe this from my gut
and sing it with lungs and belly
until all roads lead to my heart, and you.

6

Key to the Attic

May you never forget the key to granma’s attic
in the place between sleep and awake
where you found another world when you were nine
that calls you now, all these decades gone.

7

The Right Line

Take the U Train
not the Them Train
never the Should Train
not the Might-Have-Been Train
pass by the Wannabe Train
skip the Must Train
Take the U Train, you.

The card game mentioned above is a literary variant of my Coincidence Card Game, whose rules are fully explained in Sidewalk Oracles. I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year at magical Mosswood Hollow from May 21-26 and at a beautiful country hotel near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Art: Remedios Varo, "Sympathy" (aka "The Madness of the Cat"), 1955