Seeing with Fresh Eyes

“The real voyage of discovery consists not seeing new sights, but with seeing with new eyes.”  – Pico Iyer

Great Heron at Rest
Photography by Linda Wilson

Miracles Happen
Many years ago, one of my beloved daughters was acting somewhat furtive, maintaining little eye contact, repeatedly touching her turned down face. Standing slope-shouldered behind her partner she stared at the floor. Then looked up. Light in her eyes changed deepening to a brilliant dark green like moss in the early morning. Rosiness of a pink sunset sky spread across her face. Suddenly a shift in my awareness and Joseph Pearce’s words hit home “insight is always complete and perfect in its single instant’s appearance.” In that “A-ha” moment I was seeing with fresh eyes. My daughter was carrying a special light, a heartbeat of its own swimming in her inner world.

Composer Vinteuil said, “The only true voyage is discovery…not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others….”  When we  “possess other eyes”, we allow ourselves to be transported to a wonderful and sometimes, surprising new land.

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Instructions for Life

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things. – Mary Oliver in “Wild Geese”

Family of Things

Mary Oliver saw herself in the family of things.  She recognized that by opening to what was happening around her, she was already part of the natural world. Imagine Mary as a young child walking alone in the woods away from her difficult home life when she first heard the raw honking of Canadian geese break silence.

She saw the kindness of the lead bird float on air currents allowing trailing birds to fly faster with less effort. The tired goose dropping back, graciously letting others take the lead. Oliver watches the flock head to the same wetlands where food and safety were plentiful. A beautiful rhythm year after year. Mary Oliver took this wisdom of what she encountered in nature and wrote many poems. In “Wild Geese”, she penned these words “you do not have to be good” nor “walk on your knees,” but let the “soft animal of your body love what it loves.” In my reflection of these words, I think Mary suggests that experiencing the natural world helps us begin to shift from whatever we’re experiencing—anger, frustration, sadness—and realize there is a place for us. That we can accept ourselves—belong.

Oliver’s instructions for life are  simple: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” She said one of the wonderful things about being immersed in life is the joy of surprise. Feeling joy is a redemption for our life, no matter our struggles she insisted “the world goes on…”

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Seeing is Knowing

Finding a place I can see with new eyes.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote “As a man is, so he sees.”

Expectations and Seeing
How we see our world shapes what we know according to Andy Clark, cognitive psychologist. Our brains make predictions of what it expects to see and limits our reality to that. “Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience,” Clark continues, “from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.” It’s true, what we perceive today is embodied in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before. Past histories are important. Seeing is knowing.

Discovering Yourself
All my life I’ve loved water and trees. It can be a mountain stream, farm pond, and, visited last month, Hanging Horn, a large Minnesota lake rippling with a strong north wind and rimmed with dancing ladies wearing tutus of orange and yellow leaves. Those flirty cottonwoods curtsying and prancing fill me with nostalgia for my Mother, an observer, a seer who had the wise eyes of an artist. Mother was touched by nature and all that it contained. Through painting she was guided inwardly to a larger and more bountiful life. Maxime Lagace said, “By discovering nature you discover yourself.”

As she grew older, Mother gained new perspectives and a deeper appreciation for all that was. Her canvases in later years shine depth and authenticity, a kind of awareness that can only be created by living in tandem with green things, in the open, nature. In one painting an old knotted apple tree sways at its knees and another, a copse of aspens with branches playing with each other like school age friends. Mother’s depiction of a ramshackle grey barn with a young boy chasing a mutt is my favorite. On the canvas, too, a towering oak tree, the father of all trees, is a carved heart with initials. Mother’s D.K. alongside initials of someone else. It took me a while before I recognized the letters were not father’s. Seeing is knowing. Even at age seventy Mother was a romantic.

Sending Invocations
The last night at Hanging Horn we sit close to the water’s edge gathered shoulder to shoulder around a campfire. The lake a black mirror reflecting pinpoints of light. Marshmallows burnt hang from pointed sticks. Symphonic layers of sudden laughter rise as some fall unbidden into the flames. “Oh, no, another one, Gram!” A chilly wind kicks up the fire’s embers that float like tiny Chinese good luck lanterns into the dark sky. I close my eyes and send silent invocations summoning the spirit of Pegasus, the constellation of creativity, inspiration and freedom. Watching my granddaughters’ turned faces look up I see Pegasus transformed in them. All light and love, emancipated. — “alive” in the world.  And, as Joanna Macy beautifully described, “…with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words.”— Becky Breed

Writing/Creativity exercise:

  1. Choose a memory from a time you were in nature. Who were you with? What did you do? Describe the colors and season. Why is it important to you? Suggested activities: Artists, create a canvas reflecting this memory. For writers, create a prose piece or poem about your favorite nature memory.
  2. Select a type of tree you are most like or would like to be. For example, a fruit bearing fruit, a giant redwood, a Christmas fir, one splintered by lightning but still alive, the tree you grew up with or your choice. What characteristics will you relate? Passions? If the tree could talk (maybe it has), what would she say? Now write.
  3. Invocations are deeply held convictions asking for guidance or assistance. Today, what words would you use? To whom? Write your own invocation.
  4. What does being “alive” in the world mean? Tell a trusted friend what this means to you.

 

 

 

 

Find Your Creative Edge: Follow the Love Trail

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order…the continuous thread of revelation.” – Eudora Welty

Dreaming Asleep
I had a dream the other night which encouraged me to follow the love trail, confusing in some ways, yet wonderfully reassuring. It took me to a deeper place, a place of invitation that led me as poet David Whyte writes to “where we are most alive and awake…living on the edge of our existence.” Following the love trail takes writers and artists to a creative edge when remarkable and lasting experiences reach for you and move you forward. And where you think-especially sweet-of him or her and sometimes it.

Life Holds Mystery
Looking back holds mystery for us. We want to think more about life”…the brevity of it, the complexity of it, the incredible richness that enters into it…” writes author Marilynne Robinson. These moments of transformation fill us with joy, celebration, longing. What else is love? Like telling dad at his graveside that his beloved barn is gone. Went up in a hot fire. Brother used an old electrical heating lamp to take care of baby pigs and over heated. I know losing that barn was like losing a friend I whispered. But we still have the memories. The only thing good about the barn being gone is on a cold, winter morning you can watch the sun slowly rise.

Writing to connect Memories
Powerful stories and images emerge when we follow the love trail connecting what we’ve experienced to our art or writing. These lived stories radically resonate in us; we did not learn them from books or from other people, but gained them firsthand as personal encounters of love, commitment and longing. Moments of truth, of loss and the everlasting search for meaning and love hard-wire into our memories pivotal moments that continue to surface. But they can be bittersweet. We wonder what could have been, reflecting on the perfectness of the union or the beauty of the remembered sunset. Yet, powerful memories stir the imagination and bring a vividness and spontaneity to our process of creating. These remembered experiences enrich art-making and expand us in ways where we feel the melancholy, wistfulness or joy from the past. A creative edge crystallizes and we dizzily fall into a deep pool of possibility and imagination.

Following the love trail offers writers and artists opportunities to grow in their craft. It opens the door to a larger existence, offers a creative edge–a more authentic one. More life, more love and we begin to recognize how layered and textured our lives truly are. And how deep and wide precious memories.– Becky Breed

Writing/Creative Exercise

1. Jeffrey Kugler wrote “…and the genius of sleep is that it allows you to explore other, untried avenues.” Dreams are often fragmented and unclear. Yet, they can often lead to new creative horizons. Leave a notebook by your bed at night and after awakening take a few notes. What were the details of the dream? Who was in them? Where was the love? Choose one or parts of several dreams and create a love poem or an art piece emanating love.
2. Read Shoulders by Naomi Shihab Nye. Most of us have experienced familial love, a kind of natural love experienced in a family. Select an experience with one who showered you with unconditional love. Put a frame around the memories. Now create a creative love trail using your hands to convey the message.
3. Reflect on a time when romantic love possessed you. Read It is Here by Harold Pinter. Who are you remembering? Perhaps, the heady, rousing feelings of a dramatic crush remain unforgotten. The sweetness of a long time love. Consider these words as the first line in your written piece “In this room…” or sketch a face, start with the lips.
4. Finally, the words of E.M. Forster: “You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” Create what you know about love.

Extraordinary! Creative Peak Experience

Peak experience in nature

The morning poet William Stafford died, he drafted a poem containing these lines: You can’t tell when strange things with meaning will happen.  I’m (still) here writing it down just the way it was .“You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand into the sun again. It was all easy.”

Watching the horizon
Out of the far sky, sounds like frogs’ croaking and braying from donkeys pervade the air, dark spots flying a moving amoeba. The black birds, I learned later anhingas, circle the Shumard oak trees floating a while on tropical air currents before coasting to nearby branches.

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Because Stories Matter

“Reading is an exercise in empathy,” Malorie Blackman said, “an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” I believe this, and I believe that stories, the reading and writing of them are important. They can make a big difference in our lives. They can help us grow.

Recently I read a book that touched me in a way I did not expect. The book is Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, and I admit that I was attracted first of all because the name of the title character is the same as mine. In addition I admire Strout’s previous Pulitzer Prize winning novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge. So I knew I was in for some good writing. But I did not expect to be so moved, so affected as I was.

The novel takes place in the year 2020, in the first days of the Pandemic—remember those days? When we did not really know what was happening, but we were alarmed. And as time went on, we became even moreso. In the beginning of the book, writer Lucy Barton, is convinced by her ex-husband that “to save her life” she must leave her New York apartment and take up residence with him in a house in a small town in Maine.

So the story is about the fears of the pandemic, but also its freedoms that can be found living in solitude. Living a simpler life. In addition, it is about the relationship between Lucy and her ex-husband, Arthur. As well as the domestic difficulties of their two grown daughters. All of which makes for interesting plot dynamics.

But the part of the novel that most intrigues me has to do with a woman Lucy meets while volunteering. (Fully masked and socially distanced, of course) at a Food Pantry. The woman is Charlene Bibber, fifty-something years of age who works as a cleaner in a retirement center.

Charlene is somewhat of a character, and though the two are of vastly different backgrounds and occupations, Charlene is funny and honest and the two find many things in common. As women of a certain age, they worry about thinning hair, about losing things. About whether the quarantine is causing them to “lose their minds.” And as time goes on, a true friendship forms. In our times of sticking to our homogenous social circles, Lucy recognizes how extraordinary this is, and how valuable.

Then the woman remarks that she is glad they don’t talk politics. And when Lucy sees the bumper sticker on Charlene’s car lauding a certain president she detests, she has a moment of awakening.

This is just a small moment in the book, but it is an important one, one that gave me a great deal to think about. It has been said that fiction is a lie that over and over reveals the truth. In reading stories, we find this. And in writing stories, developing well-rounded characters, we inhabit the mind of “the other” for a while, and our lives become more expansive, fuller. We become rich in ways we couldn’t have imagined.                                                                                                                                                                   –Lucy Adkins

Writing and Creativity Exercise

  1. Think about books you’ve read that have widened your understanding of someone different from you. Books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X or I Am Malala. Consider sharing the titles of these books in the Comments.
  1. For the next poem or story you write, think about writing about someone of an entirely different background from you. You might write offering a different perspective of someone you considered a bully as a child, or someone in your elementary school class who couldn’t seem to learn to read. Take the point of view of an individual from a different socioeconomic class. Write and see what enlightenment may happen.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase Writing in Community or our latest book, The Fire Inside.

 

Wild Passions

Always I have loved gardens and gardening, but about 15 years ago after moving into a new house (new to me, anyway) and acquiring a yardful of plants and flowers, I suddenly became obsessed with all things relating to flowers–perennials, in particular. It became for me my wild passion. I checked out books from the library—Perennial All Stars and Perennial Combinations (two I remember), and pored through the pages. I loved everything about those books. I liked the pictures, of course, the descriptions of the various plants, and I especially liked their names.

There was the elegant Lady’s Mantle, the exotic Siberian Iris and Golden Hakone Grass. There was Purple Toadflax—what was that?  Silver Wormwood and Bear’s Breech? It was almost as if there were years and years of ancient lore underlying each plant, and I wanted to learn about them all. I indulged myself in those books, and then in as many plants as would thrive in the twenty by forty patch of soil under my care.

It’s wonderful when these “wild passions” make their appearances, making each day a little more exciting, each new encounter adding wonder and meaning and fulfillment to our lives. Of course there are romantic passions. And relationships with family and friends.  But if we are lucky, we will experience all sorts of grand passions. Like a passion for learning, for music, perhaps, or for gardening. The more we have, the better. I think that’s how we were meant to live: like children finding delight in each new thing, like lovers wild for what we love.

From time to time, I’ve had flings with crewel embroidery, ceramics, and macramé—remember macramé? Those passions came and went.  Others have been more enduring. I love the work of poet, Mary Oliver, and have bought every book of hers I could lay my hands on. The same with Linda Pastan, Kim Addonizio, and Dorrianne Laux. Also Joyce Sutphen. A new discovery for me is poet George Bilgere, and I highly recommend his book, The Good Kiss. And I greatly admire the novelists Alice Hoffman and Chris Bohjalian. There are many more, of course, and  more out there I haven’t discovered yet. The thought of that send chills down my spine!

And now we come to that other great love affair you might be experiencing—that with creativity, in whatever form it takes. “Passion is energy,” Oprah Winfrey said. “Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” Let that passion burn. Embrace it, take that passion to a beautiful place, and make it yours forever. It’s a wonderful way to be alive.

What about you? What are some of your great passions?
–Lucy Adkins (Note: This appeared in a slightly different version in The Fire Inside by Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed)

 

Writing Exercise:

  1. Read the Poem “Night Fishing” by Peter Sears.
  2. Make a list of some of the human emotions/conditions…like loneliness, happiness, a feeling of self-satisfaction. You can think of more.
  3. Make a list of some of the activities you do…like fishing, mowing the lawn, making a pie, and so on.
  4. Choose one of the human emotions/conditions, and pair it with an activity.
  5. Write, beginning with a first line that makes a comparison between the human emotion or condition and the activity.

You might be surprised at what happens!

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase Writing in Community or our latest book, The Fire Inside.

 

 

 

Your Wild and Precious Life

Your Wild and Precious Life

“Tell me,” Mary Oliver wrote, “what is it you intend to do with your wild and precious life?” What a wonderful question! And one we answer every day with every decision we make. Every action we take. And now that it is spring, the time of new beginnings, it’s a good question to ask again.

As children, we make discovery after discovery; every day brings something new; and we learn, we delight, we find joy in one wonderful new experience after another.  As we grow older, the pace of discovery slows down, but we still have many opportunities to make new and exciting finds, and open up our lives.

Perhaps some spring, we decide to plant a few flowers, and suddenly find ourselves intrigued with the world of gardening, plotting grand new schemes of beauty for the back yard.

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Magic of Awe Inspires Creativity

“My mother loved butterflies. After her celebration of life, a Monarch was fluttering around the exit door. She followed me to my car. Later, I wrote a poem about my mother migrating south with Monarchs. Glorious” – Becky Breed

If someone asks “What makes a good life?” Would you say friends and family you can count on? A spiritual connection? Personal resources that make you happy? Dacher Keltner, author of “The Thrilling New Science of Awe,” replied, “Find awe.” In his many years of research, he found that an awe-inspired life gives us meaning, and helps uncover something larger than ourselves–intense joy and  a sense of mystery that transcend common life. For artists and writers, there’s more. The magic of awe inspires creativity, creating a sense of wonder and deep curiosity–profound satisfaction and meaning.

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Writing From the White-Hot Center

Writing From the White-Hot Center

This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.”  I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”

She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”

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