BREATHING INTO NATURE

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Material Faith

One thing I know for sure is that most of us spend a lot of time indoors. It is much rarer to get lost in the woods these days than it is to get lost on Facebook or behind our screens. Technology races us forward, and yet some wild part of us yearns for a deep, slow, and intimate connection with the natural world. This section is our attempt (first and foremost) to get all of us (authors included) outside more. And once we are out, to get deeply curious about how the wonders, mysteries, beauty, darkness, and tragedies of nature can, as Thoreau said, give birth to imagination and artistry.

When we think about breathing into nature, we have to do so with our bodies. Not just in terms of literally placing ourselves in the forest or on a mountain but allowing ourselves to reconnect to the part of us that is wild, animal, and inseparable from nature, herself. In an incredibly moving interview with The Guardian on the “environment,” the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh said beautifully, “You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.”

Whether you pray or not, I am sure you can think of a moment in your life when some piece or part or vista of the natural world left you breathless. Usually, in these moments, some part of us melts into wonder and expands into awe. We sense something holy, however we may name it. We become quiet. Perhaps we pause or listen for the first time in a long while. We start to feel ourselves as a small part of an interconnected web of beings—beings who crawl, beings who fly, beings who root down into the earth. We give and take from them all. There is, indeed, a real communication that opens up in these moments, should we allow it.

Our work, as artists of deep creativity, is not just in breathing our bodies (back) into nature, but in breathing nature back into our bodies—recalling and remembering our inherent wildness, our animal nature. I sometimes feel there is an immediate association with the words animal and wild, which means fierce, chaotic, or ferocious. Indeed, this is part of it, and a lot of creativity can spring from such passionate ferocity. But our wild, animal nature can also be gentle, graceful, and sensuous. It embodies the full spectrum. I would dare to say that almost every quality we experience or feel can be mirrored, in some shape or form, in the natural world. And so, we remain infinitely open as we communicate and connect to those parts of ourselves, as creatives.

Our work also asks us to reflect on how we breathe into nature. One of our calls to you (and ourselves) in this book is to return to a place where our creative work is reflective and intentional, and nature has a way of slowing us down, of reminding us that everything moves in cycles. I dare to claim that we notice her nuances, find her hidden stories, and shudder at her agony when we enter with an internal attitude of reverence. And it’s no secret that we live in a time when such reverence toward our dear Earth is hard to come by, when our abuse and misuse are so starkly apparent in her every corner. Those are stories deep creativity calls us to tell and notice as much as the beautiful and breathtaking ones. We don’t shy away from the darkness or despair that may arise in our real communication with Mother Earth. Her darkness and despair are also within us. We cannot ignore it.

Perhaps we can become her advocate, her lover. And like all good lovers, we don’t only pay attention to the parts we like or what is pleasant or appealing to us, selecting some aspects and leaving others behind. We must also allow ourselves to be moved and captivated where she shows her vulnerability and wounding. Nature has her deep wounds, as we have ours. What are her messages now? What crevice or particular aspect of hers catches your breath when you breathe her in or breathe yourself into her? Follow that, and follow it deeply.

Understanding Sea Turtle: Moving toward the Spirit of the Depths

Deborah

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.

—C. G. JUNG, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

A cocoon softened around my ears, and silence crept into the blue spaces all around me. I was mesmerized, lost in an underwater world of quiet, simple beauty. I felt—in the same single moment—as vast as the ocean herself and as small as a single droplet upon her finger.

Floating motionless with my snorkel in the Virgin Islands, I watched a small family of sea turtles gliding from the ocean floor to the surface, only to melt back down to the depths. Their movement felt meditative, smooth and intentional.

Down on the ocean floor, they felt far away. Me as observer. Turtles as observed. I didn’t like that feeling—a jolting and stark realization of our separateness. But when they began to swim to the surface, I could sense their energy, see the detail on their magnificent shells, and catch their eyes.

A warmth radiated from within me, and I wished to speak to them. Yet, somehow, I knew that we were already speaking—just not in a literal way, not in my native human tongue. The language between us moved well beyond normal speech, and yet I felt a simultaneous swell of frustration because I couldn’t reach the intimacy I desired. Each time I felt a deepening sense of connection, someone would splash by in a rubber suit and large flippers. I longed for a quiet intimacy with these creatures in their natural habitat. I didn’t want to feel like another wet-suit-wearing, goggle-googling observer—like one of the thousand snorkelers who swim through their world, tick the box, and leave, largely unaltered by the experience, the memory quickly vanishing after being stored on the plastic, underwater camera or posted to Facebook. Another memento to file away and forget. This seems to be an all-too-familiar story when it comes to “nature excursions”—clicking iPhones, snapping cameras, chatting with other humans, and darting on to the next thing before we have had any real and moving experience of where we are or who we are truly with.

Deep creativity is ensouled.

Called back to the boat by a loud whistle and a few screams, I felt an eruption of sadness deep in my belly that rose upward to my throat. It felt like the same hue of sadness that swarms around me when I am leaving a loved one after what feels like much too short of an interaction, not knowing when I will see them again. As I reacclimatized to the surface world, I couldn’t stop thinking about my experience with the sea turtles. Something had opened within me, something had landed upon my heart and sunk right to its center. In a quiet, internal moment, I reflected upon their meditative movement—the way they find food among the depths of the ocean, periodically surfacing for air, for breath, only to dive back down again.

This sequence seemed to mirror a movement I have come to know intimately in the creative process—diving down into the unconscious, surfacing periodically for air (the realm of consciousness), only to return back down to the depths for what feeds us and our creative growth. The food is at the bottom, in the waters of the unconscious, and yet survival also relies on the surfacing, on breathing our experiences back into conscious integration, into our own unique expressions of creativity.

In the deep creative process, there is an intimate relationship between the unconscious and conscious aspects of our psyche. As artists, we are called to dive down into the unfamiliar waters of the unconscious to discover an entirely new world full of unusual characters, strange animals, discoveries, dreams, fragmented thoughts, and repressed emotions. We are also called to bring those contents of the unconscious into the conscious world, to give them life and expression of their own through our artistic medium. It is as if we are a psychopomp of sorts—not escorting souls to the afterlife but escorting the contents of the unconscious world into the realm of the conscious living.

Deep creativity is alchemical.

SPIRIT OF THE DEPTHS AND SPIRIT OF THE TIMES

In depth psychological language or dialogue, we often remove the article “the” and capitalize the first letter when speaking of an Other that we have encountered. This allows the Other to remain in its otherness—as its own subject, rather than simply an object of our attention. “The sea turtle” becomes “Sea Turtle” to provide the figure its own autonomy and respect. It can become a very beautiful way of speaking, of writing, of knowing, acknowledging the true presence of whomever we encounter.

Sea Turtle reminds us of the gentle and intentional way we are sometimes called to approach the bridge between the depths and the surface, and our own creative process. The wisdom of Sea Turtle resides in patience and grace, in slow, conserving movements. This stands in stark contradiction to the manic, demanding, rushed, and scattered energy I often feel in modern creative circles.

In his early depth psychological writings, C. G. Jung made a distinction between two oppositional forces present in our contemporary world: the spirit of the depths and the spirit of the times. We often find ourselves straddling both. The spirit of the times rushes toward outer success, rationalism, and directed thinking, and risks having the magical waters of imagination dry out upon materialistic shores. It is a distraction away from creativity, distancing us from the imaginative ways we can relate to the world. The spirit of the times values rapid production and intellectual explanation over imaginal understanding. It is the fast-paced snorkeler with a checklist, uninterested in a true encounter with the underwater world. The spirit of the times is a great temptress, and we can spend our entire life navigating her surface fluctuations if we are not careful.

The spirit of the depths, however, whispers of what is beneath, speaks in symbol, moves us back to the tides of creativity and currents of nondirected thinking. It reinfuses our cracked skin with moisture from the soul and imagination. Creativity calls us to come into a more conscious relationship with this spirit, to know the depths, to explore them as food for our art or creative expression. And Sea Turtle has much to teach us here, should we be willing to listen.

But how do we begin?

I have found that one powerful way to contact the spirit of the depths is to immerse ourselves in the natural world, without restlessness or distraction. Nature rushes not, but moves in cycles, honoring the rhythm of each season and what it has to offer. In nature, I am removed, intentionally, from the conscious, rational spirit of the times. I begin to recall what I have long forgotten—my embodied ability to commune with the world around me—to stop talking or emailing or texting or Facebooking or explaining for a moment and to simply recall how to connect and listen.

This kind of deep connection and listening, however, demands solitude and long spaces of silence to access. Solitude and silence are both great friends when connecting to the spirit of the depths. It can be very difficult to move beyond surface chatter if we go out into nature with a companion (or group of companions). Unless all parties have agreed to a different kind of excursion or experience, we find ourselves negotiating between social expectations and inner desires. We walk six miles, listening to the updates and issues of our beloved friend, only to realize that we have come to the end of the trail completely unaware of our own surroundings. The great Albert Einstein said, “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” This statement (found in a collection of Einstein’s essays, Out of My Later Years) completely redefines our immediate associations with the word stimulation. We often associate stimulation with the awakening or stirring presence of agents around us. However, Einstein reverses this association by stating that the creative mind can be “stimulated” in a vacuum, by a quiet (rather than chaotic) life, by silence, stillness, and solitude. When the surface waters calm down, we can see into the depths, and the contents of the unconscious begin to emerge into the realm of our conscious mind.

SETTLING INTO STILLNESS

Certain depth psychological teachings echo this wisdom of Einstein’s—that a vacuum of consciousness and critical attention is often needed to encourage a direct confrontation with the unconscious. In some of his more esoteric writings, Jung explored the Tibetan yogic teaching of meditation—one that takes the practitioner into a state “devoid of mental concentration…[a] dissolution of consciousness.”

Many Eastern teachings and mystical traditions offer similar approaches and suggest meditation as the way in—a practice that moves us past our original state of consciousness into a state of complete rest—providing the necessary vacuum for the contents of the unconscious to surface. In the second Yoga Sutra, the great sage Patanjali defined yoga as the settling of the mind into stillness. He went on to say that our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind. With the settling of the mind, one sinks into an experience of that which is normally overshadowed.

The problem for many of us is how to attain this “settling of the mind into stillness” that Patanjali described. While there are many techniques that are beneficial to explore, meditation not only includes sitting still and straight-spined upon a cushion. There are also more active forms of meditation, and I find quiet, solitary walks in nature immensely healing and settling to my often chaotic and overrun mind. I have noticed, however, that the effectivity and power of this practice lies in how we approach our time in the natural world.

First of all, even when void of physical company, we need to disconnect in order to truly connect. In our digital age, distraction is never more than a finger’s reach away. When I venture out into nature, it is insatiably tempting to snap pictures for a killer Facebook post. But as tempting as it may be, I must (at least every so often) leave technology completely behind. When I do, I am always amazed by the amount of time it takes to stop instinctively reaching for my phone every few minutes. For most of us, this has become like a reflex. One of my dear friends disabled her social media pages because she found herself thinking only in status updates throughout her entire day. Her mind had lost its ability to think in long, complex sentences. And I think this problem is more familiar to many of us than we would like to admit. Taking any kind of “digital detox” can be immensely confronting, but it is often necessary when we want to invite the tides of deep creativity to arise and inspire us.

Deep creativity is attentive.

It was Jung, in a quote from The Earth Has a Soul, who said wisely, “You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.” “The simple and forgotten things”—my favorite part of Jung’s statement. We do not find ourselves among elaborate conversations, sophisticated libraries, and emotional debates or among the jungle of complex philosophy and thinking. We find ourselves in the simple and forgotten things—the things that amazed us as children, the imaginal experiences that arose so naturally when we used to play, carelessly, in the forest or on the beach or even in our favorite corner in our backyard.

This childlike curiosity or imagination is incredibly difficult to reach when checking our text messages and emails every few steps or even when journeying out with a good book. In order to create that vacuum of consciousness—that “unstimulation” that leads to deep creative stimulation or that meditative state when walking—we should bring along as little distraction as possible.

Secondly, we are called to change the way we move. When I spend time alone in nature, I am always shocked by how long it can take to drop the rushing and my own agenda. Many minutes pass before I become aware of my own body and feel the essence of slowing down. I notice, as my movement becomes more smooth and intentional (much like my beloved Sea Turtles’), there is space for true connection and insight to emerge. I begin to feel the swelling, mystery, and presence of something deeper when I disconnect from restlessness and rushing. I come into a meaningful awareness and connection not only with my own body but with the bodies all around me.

When we slow down, we are able to feel again, to tune in to our own rhythms, to understand ourselves as feeling creatures, with miraculous and magical senses. We are not walking brains, solely thinking our way through the world, no matter how much anyone may try to convince us of that. Creativity comes alive when our senses of hearing, taste, sight, smell, and touch are awakened and revered. And realizing the immense gift of our full sensing body often demands slowing down, getting quiet, and becoming deeply aware. The senses are our raw creative data and material. We are called then, as artists, to reconnect to our own animal nature, our own animal body first. To wake up to ourselves as a sensing organism, living amidst other sensing organisms.

Deep creativity is embodied.

As we start to reconnect to our own animal body, we come into a deeper awareness, connection, and relationship to the other animal bodies all around us. We suddenly hear sounds we have never heard before, feel movement in drastically new ways, and see elements of the natural world that we otherwise would have rushed by. Our body is in a sacred and intertwining relationship with the other bodies all around us. We must feel this again and notice what comes alive as we do. We lose so much when we lose touch with this.

SEA TURTLE AS THE MASTER OF SERENITY

A few days after my initial meeting with the sea turtles in the Virgin Islands, I woke up early on a midweek morning to drink coffee alone, noticing a continuous energy of contemplation within me. I felt my body sitting on the wicker chair a few feet from the edge of our ground-floor, outdoor balcony. My bare feet rested on the concrete floor, which still held a lingering coolness from hours with the moon. The warm air brushed my nose, and I found myself closing my eyes instinctively a few times to feel the touch of the air more intimately. I moved my chair off the balcony. My feet longed for the softer cushion of the living grass and moistened soil.

A few hours and a couple of cups of coffee later, I joined my family on a hike to an isolated beach on a different part of the island. We decided to snorkel out to a small cove, which lay about half a mile away from shore. There was a small glimmer of hope within me that I would, somehow, encounter my beloved sea turtles again, but this area was not noted for being a natural habitat for them, so the hope grew dim.

I decided to distance myself from the group. I wanted silence and solitude, so I swam alone among the colorful coral with schools of tropical fish. I took my time, becoming more and more lost in the otherworldliness of life below the surface of things. I may have been void of human company, but I was very far from being alone. I felt every movement of my own body, and my senses came alive. The sounds were so different down here—muffled and yet calming. I noticed how every other creature and body around mine was so unique in its own movement, its own sound, its own color, its own way of breathing. We were all down here, breathing and moving in relation to one another. I thought of the spirit of the depths. My entire family swam ahead, eager to get back and rest on the shores of the beach where we initially began.

During my return swim, I kept very close to the shore in shallow waters and remembered the motion of the sea turtles I had come to love. I didn’t have to rush or push past my energy reserves. Slow and intentional, I remembered. In tune with deeper rhythms. That is their way.

Just as that thought passed through my head, no more than two feet away from me, a sea turtle appeared. It may sound ridiculously trite or cheesy, but I felt warm tears spontaneously drop from my eyes. There was no one around us. Just me and Sea Turtle, in shallow waters where even the depth of the sea floor couldn’t separate us. I was initially swimming in one direction, she in the other. I changed my direction and swam right next to her for what felt like an eternity. My body in relation to hers. Her body in relation to mine. Both of our bodies in relation to Sea. Sea in relation to Sun. Sun in relation to Sky.

Sea Turtle’s energy infused into a deeper crevice within me. I watched her eyes as she seemed to be watching mine. I felt a sense of oneness and melting, drowning in this ocean of love, broken open by a true encounter that transported me to a very simple and beautiful place. No mental processing felt necessary. Just pure relationship and deep understanding. And, wow, she was masterful in her slow, intentional movements under the sea. As she swam beside me, I was reminded of a passage from the Tao Te Ching. In it Lao Tzu writes, “Gravity is the root of lightness; stillness, the ruler of movement” (James Legge translation).

It is no secret that we modern humans rarely allow stillness to rule our movement. In fact, we can be quite impatient and restless. And this restlessness begins to deafen our ears to the subtler sounds and movement of things, disconnects us from the larger systems that we are a part of, and prevents us from moments of true encounter, which can serve as great inspiration for our creativity. With restlessness comes a waste of energy, a spinning that leads nowhere and exhausts us of vital energy necessary for our creative process. We begin to create something simply to create something. We lose our ability to listen deeply for true creative inspiration that is authentic to our own unique voice and path. We forget that the creative cauldron often burns slow and steady. And creativity cannot be forced. It must be allowed the space and time to emerge. When we feel an onward rush or the pressure to produce, we must remember to embody the wisdom of Sea Turtle.

If we don’t, we can be blown to and fro, hitting major pitfalls of loss, fatigue, and burnout. We lose touch with who we are and the natural inspiration all around us. Creative fatigue can be a hugely debilitating side effect of modern restlessness. But it appears as a sacred visitor to take us deep into ourselves to fix what is no longer working. Have you ever tried to be creative when you feel exhausted, mentally and physically? It is not an easy task. For me, it feels like blowing, desperately, on the sails of a boat I’m trying to move, rather than flowing with the natural surges of the bustling wind around me.

But Sea Turtle evokes Lao Tzu’s creative master by staying serenely in herself and allowing stillness to rule her movements. Each movement feels in tune with a deeper rhythm, holds direction and purpose, and moves without exhaustive haste. Sea Turtle is a beautiful embodiment of the spirit of the depths—a representation of the wise one within us, who rushes not and wastes not but simply floats between the ocean depth (where Sea Turtle finds food) and the creative surface (where Sea Turtle finds air).

I recently listened to a podcast interview with the beloved poet Mary Oliver. Her segment in one of my all-time favorite podcasts, On Being with Krista Tippett, was titled “Listening to the World.” Like Sea Turtle, Mary Oliver is also a master in her own right whose words deeply entwine with the majesty and mystery of the natural world. She lives a life of solitude, and her creativity is immensely inspired by nature, by the simple and forgotten things. Her poems are simply portraits of that ever-changing love affair, and I found the interview immensely inspiring.

When asked about her creative process, she talked about taking long and solitary walks in the woods with a notebook. She simply listens to the world and writes down what she hears. She acknowledges the unromantic aspect of her craft as well—that much of what she writes will be thrown away. But she also knows, if she keeps listening, that many of her words will find the page, and hopefully then, the heart of her reader. I found myself utterly captivated by the way she talked about listening as if it contained the secrets to the entire universe of creativity.

Far into the interview she posed two questions that she often asks herself: How shall I live? What does it mean that the Earth is so beautiful, and what shall I do about it?

This question, for me, is everything. What does it mean that the Earth is so beautiful, and what shall I do about it?

This question somehow implies, in a very undemanding way, a sense of responsibility that we—as creatives and writers and painters and musicians and poets and dancers—have to not only be inspired by nature but also use our craft to serve the natural world.

Do you see how gorgeous and radical this question is? Not only is the natural world meant to be in service to our creativity, but our creativity is also meant to be in service to the natural world. In this essay, for example, Sea Turtle was in service to my writing, but my writing was also in service to Sea Turtle.

We no longer meet Mother Nature only to gain creative inspiration. We meet her with an offering of a creative spirit, a listening vessel, a willingness to allow our creative art to be used, formed, and molded by her. The question broadens from “What can my creativity gain from nature?” to include an additional query: “What can nature gain from my creativity?”

Deep creativity is reciprocal.

This is the kind of question that slows us down, that leads us to Sea Turtle’s waters of true reflection, which naturally arise from the spirit of the depths and launch us far into our creative potential and process.

EXERCISES

Deborah invites you to these reflections.

When or under what circumstances did you hear, touch, smell, taste, or see something that pulled you down into a deeper sense of awareness or consciousness, that revealed another level of being? Describe the sensations you felt in your body, as well as your revelations.

Do you make it a practice to “disconnect in order to truly connect” to your creativity? How might you disconnect even more?

What is the relationship between your body and your creativity? Do you connect with it before you create, through practices like breathing or meditation or any form of mindfulness? Do you find yourself more connected to your body while you are creating, or do you lose it during your most creative moments?

Can you create something from these reflections?

Deborah invites you to this practice.

THE ESSENCE OF SLOWING DOWN

As I mentioned earlier, creativity comes alive when our senses of hearing, taste, sight, smell, and touch are awakened and revered. And realizing the immense gift of our full sensing body often demands slowing down, getting quiet, and becoming deeply aware. The senses are our raw creative data and material. We are called then, as artists, to reconnect to our own animal nature, our own animal body first. To wake up to ourselves as a sensing organism, living amidst other sensing organisms.

This practice invites you to slow down and connect with your body, with your own animal nature, before you enter into your creative practice. It doesn’t have to take long, less than five minutes, but you may find that you begin your practice more mindful and stimulated with the raw creative data that the senses evoke.

SIGHT Begin by taking a 360-degree look around your environment. Notice what’s in front of you, what’s behind you, and what’s to each side. Notice all the color surrounding you. Notice the objects in your space and make sure they feed your creativity, not distract you from it. Look for anything that wants to be moved in or out of your line of vision.

HEARING Focus your attention on what you can hear when you enter your creative space. Is it silence, or the whir of a space heater at your feet? Is it the cacophony of traffic, or the white noise from a nearby freeway? Can you hear birds singing, or the television set droning in an adjacent room? Once you have established what you hear, ask yourself what you might like to hear that could enhance your creativity. If it’s silent in your space, perhaps you’ll want to play soft music. If it’s cacophonous, perhaps you’ll want to turn on a calming water fountain. If you’re focusing on right-brain, image-related creativity, perhaps you’ll want to play an audiobook or a podcast to stimulate your left brain too.

TOUCH Feel the clothing against your skin. Feel the temperature that surrounds you. Feel your fingertips, warm your hands, thank them for the work they are about to do. Run your fingers across your keyboard, over your desk, around your instrument. Raise your paintbrush to your cheek and feel the hairs of the brush lightly tickle you. Sink your hands into the soil and feel its grainy texture. Pat the cat that sits on your drafting table and feel the thrum of her purr. If you feel any anxiety about creating, find something to touch that soothes or put on a piece of clothing that comforts.

SMELL How does the air smell in your creative space? Does it smell musky, like it could benefit from an open window? Does it smell too much like your husband’s cologne or your wife’s perfume and thus distract? Does the air surrounding you make you want to inhale deeply, getting more oxygen into your creative brain? Might you want to scent your surroundings with a candle or incense? If you are writing about the ocean or painting a rose, consider bringing in smells to evoke the experience. Having a collection of essential oils may be just what you need to stimulate your creativity.

TASTE What do you taste in your mouth as you enter into your creative space? Did you just finish breakfast, so it’s the taste of warm butter on toast? Did you just brush your teeth, so you taste wintery fresh? Ask yourself, “What taste would stimulate my creativity right now?” Perhaps it’s a rich cup of coffee made from Costa Rican beans. Maybe it’s a grassy glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Maybe it’s a stick of Big Red gum that reminds you of your childhood. Bring that taste into your space and pair it with your creativity.

Now your fully sensing (and sensitive) body is fully present to you, is fully present with you. See what creating from this space feels like and how this practice might affect your work.

“A Creativity We Cannot Fathom”: Hallowed Be Nature’s Name

Jennifer

GETTING OUT OF MY HEAD AND IN TO THE WORLD

As an academic and a writer, I spend about 90 percent of my time in 10 percent of my body—my head. I hang out with words—reading words, writing words, pushing words together, and pulling them apart. My vision is often myopic, focused only on the screen or the page, my body as lifeless as a zombie, while my mind has the zoomies. Everything in that world is black and white—black letters, white page.

I’ve lived in this world since I was a child. I’m comfortable there, in the world of words. Still, it is an internal world of sorts, a solitary world—just me and all those words. It’s also an indoor world of sorts, me tethered to my laptop, my laptop tethered to the power source.

I need to get out more. Out of my house, out of my head, out of the world of the word. Getting out of the house is easy. Getting out of my head is harder. Deep in thought, I can walk for a mile and not notice much of anything. My legs are just the vehicle to drive my heavy head around while it continues its machinations.

The poet Mary Oliver tells us over and over again in her poetry and her prose that the soul’s distinctive attribute is attentiveness. Every morning she walks in nature, and on those walks she stitches words together into a poem, her way of bearing witness to the wildness and wilderness of the soul in and of the world. She pays attention to nature, and nature pays her back with words that come as close as any I’ve ever read to capturing the wild beauty of the natural world.

I am no Mary Oliver. In fact, quite the opposite. Words can distance me from nature. While puzzling over the next paragraph of my essay or scheming over the next scene in my screenplay, I can miss the world around me. The words in me miss the me in the world. Nature per se does not inspire my writing.

Nature does, however, inspire another creative impulse within me, and that’s photography. While Mary Oliver notices and is inspired by nature when she has a notepad and pen in hand, I notice nature and am inspired by it when I have a camera in hand. In nature, without a camera, I’m more likely to be in my head, turning over the past, contemplating the future, rarely in the present here and now. But the simple act of holding a camera changes all that. I look up, I look down, I look around, I look through, I look inside what is outside. I notice color, texture, form, nuance, density, and complexity, and I notice light, the miraculous and ever-shape-shifting play of light.

Deep creativity is attentive.

In her beautiful homage to photography, God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art, Jan Phillips writes, “I realize it was not only the power of the images themselves, but the very act of focusing, of being totally attentive, that comforted me. When I look through my lens now, focused only on what is before me, I am grounded and healed in that same wonderful way. My vision is clear, and I am one with whatever I am looking at.” She continues, “It’s in the present moment that I belong. Only there do I feel my balance, find my oneness with all creatures, with all life.” Phillips also quotes photographer Diana Michener who stated, “I have always taken pictures the way people keep journals and diaries. It’s a way of ordering my reactions to the world, of placing my ideas and feelings in a concrete form outside myself, of breaking my isolation.” Photographing nature does all of this for me as well. It keeps me present, focused, and attentive, and it makes me feel connected to the Other outside of myself, outside of my head. Photographing nature breaks my isolation. And it gets me in touch with my creatureliness, my essence, my place in the family of beings, to paraphrase a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” in her book Dream Work.

SOFT ANIMAL BODIES, ALL

I first encountered “Wild Geese” in the strangest of places—on a ship cruising down the Danube River, accompanying my grandmother and traveling with seventy or eighty people who were mostly seventy to eighty years old. It was a difficult trip. The ship’s food or water became contaminated, and norovirus felled us one and all, but not before the river flooded the neighboring countries, trapping us all aboard. I felt claustrophobic, shiplocked on that sick ship, and as a result, I was a little short-tempered with my grandmother. And because I am indelibly marked by an epic guilt complex, I felt guilty for being short-tempered, for not being the perfect granddaughter.

By then I had also exhausted my reading material and was feeling supremely bored, bored enough that one afternoon I visited the ship’s library and picked up O Magazine with its perennial photograph of Oprah on the cover. Flipping through the pages rather flippantly, I landed on the poem “Wild Geese.” I read the first line, where she frees us from having to be good, and I burst into tears. The poem felt like a message from God—or at least, a message from Mary Oliver, a goddess of poetry—exonerating me from my guilt, assuring me that I’m good enough to still belong to the family of beings.

But as you live with a poem, sometimes you find your energy shifting, gravitating toward different lines, different stanzas, different images. Her line reminding us we all have our own places of despair caught my attention for a while, reminding me that everyone I meet, as difficult as they may be, has their despair too, and reminding me to be compassionate. She writes that even in our despair, the world goes on, and that’s comforted me at times, reminding me in my moments of great anxiety over the small exigencies of life that the wild geese care not for due dates and deadlines, and the world will go on whether these are met or not. But the line I’ve been living with for the past several years, the line that grabbed my attention by its lapels and shook me to my core, compares our bodies to animal bodies and gives our animal bodies permission to love.

To imagine my body as an animal has radically shifted my beingness in the world. It has helped me to connect with my animal nature, and it has helped me to deepen my spiritual connection with animal bodies in nature, both the animals who surround me and the animals whom I seek out to photograph.

This spiritual connection with animals helped me through a very painful breakup a number of years ago. My partner had moved out, leaving many lacunas in the home we had shared together—black holes where furniture used to be, white walls where colorful art used to be, too much quiet where conversation used to be, such absence where presence used to be. I needed to fill the space and the place, literally and metaphorically. And I needed to deal with the guilt of a failed relationship and my failure within it. I could have gone to therapy, yes, and I could have inquired into the meaning of the relationship and the meaning of its failure and the meaning I assigned to my part of the failure. But I intuitively knew this was not the kind of therapy I needed. I did not need to go within myself—I needed to move outside myself. And Mary Oliver’s line came to me again, and loudly. Suddenly, I knew what I needed in my home. I needed to let my animal body be loved, be seen, by the Other that is Animal.

So I created the wall. The kitchen wall, the newly blank white wall. I covered that wall in colorful photographs of animals. I had many to choose from. Everywhere I traveled, I had sought out experiences with animals. I took their photos, I took those photos home with me, and I took the time to respect them, to re-see them with infinite tenderness, spending hours on my computer in the editing process, which I came to see as a form of digital reverence.

On my wall, the animals spoke to me, and I to them. It was the language of soul spoken through the eyes, for as the theologian Martin Buber writes in his book I and Thou, “The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language.”

For two years I lived with these animals, and I learned, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes in Dream Animals, to extend and amplify my vision “so as to see the animal eye with the animal eye.” I didn’t interpret the animals—the bear over here stands for the great mother, the wolf over there stands for intuition—no. Instead I experienced the animals, both those on the walls and those I continued to seek out to photograph. Especially their eyes—I listened intently to the great language they spoke with their all-so-unique eyes.

James Hillman believed that psychology, with its movement into the interiorized self, has lost its aesthetic appreciation for the outer world. “Of all psychology’s sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty,” he writes in The Soul’s Code. He offered one remedy for that sin through an appreciation of the aesthetic display of animals. In Dream Animals, he wrote: “The animal is an aesthetic creation, the animal eye is an aesthetic eye, and the animal is compelled by an aesthetic necessity to present itself as image.” He added, “Psychology has refused to see that the animal kingdom is first of all an aesthetic ostentation, a fantasy of show, of colors and songs, of gaits and flights, and that this aesthetic display is a primordial ‘instinctual’ force laid down in the organic structure.” We are hardwired to display ourselves, we and the animals—each animal, each of us, a unique expression of psyche, of soul, of beauty. No less us than the peacock, but also no more us than the peacock—the peacock and I connect as soft animal bodies, animal same and animal different.

Deep creativity is aesthetic.

In his book of pastoral poetry titled The Animals, Richard Grossman suggests we shift our minds about the spirit and see it as animal. And so, through the therapeutic witnessing power of photography, I opened my spirit as animal, opened my animal body to them, spiritual animal bodies as well. And I healed. Slowly I come out of my wounded place inside. Slowly, I reconnected to myself. Seeing them, I saw me. Listening to them, I heard me. Loving them, I loved me. Hillman writes in Dream Animals, “You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken as to get what’s broken blessed. In many cultures, animals do the blessing since they are the divinities.” On my wall, each animal was a therapist, each animal was a blessing, each animal was a display of spirit and soul and nature, reminding me that I too am a display of spirit and soul and nature.

PAYING ATTENTION

Being with and in nature can foster healing. Being with and in nature can inspire creativity. Being creative can inspire and foster healing. The relationship between nature, creativity, and healing is an interconnected one, and all three connect us more deeply to our creaturely nature. In part, this is because all three inspire us to be more mindful, to pay attention.

Deep creativity is healing.

The word attention comes from the Latin attendere, which means, literally, “to stretch toward,” from ad, meaning “to” and tendere, meaning “stretch.” When we pay attention to something, we stretch toward it, lean into it, move nearer, whether with our literal bodies or through our soul’s energetic body.

Other words cluster around attention. There is attend, which means “to take care of.” We tend to what we care for. We become an attendant, or “one who attends.” In order to attend, we need to be in attendance, which means “to be present, to present oneself to that which calls for our attention.”

There is a familiar teaching story in the Zen tradition about an earnest student who comes to a master and asks for the highest and most secret teaching on the dharma. The master picks up a brush, dips it in some ink, and writes “Attention.” The student, sure this cannot be all there is to the dharma, pushes for another, deeper teaching. The master takes up the brush again and writes “Attention. Attention.” The student is highly unimpressed. “If you are a master, you should be able to give me more than that,” he says. The master sighs, picks up the brush, and writes “Attention. Attention. Attention.” In this story, attention is the dharma, the most basic principle that orders the universe.

I find this principle mirrored in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. In the section that gives the book its title, Shug Avery, the wild, passionate woman who serves as teacher and lover to a dogged and depressed Celie, talks to her about God. Shug tells Celie that when she found out God was a white man, she lost interest, but then she came to believe that God is everything: “Everything that is or ever was or ever will be.” She continues, “More than anything else, God love admiration.” When Celie asks if that means God is vain, Shug says, “Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

With a camera in hand, I notice the color purple in a field somewhere and photograph it. With a notepad and pen in hand, Mary Oliver notices the color purple and writes about it. You may notice the color purple and dance it, sing it, film it, paint it—all ways to praise it, all ways predicated on paying attention.

Celie asks what God does when “it” is pissed off, and Shug replies that it just makes something else. “People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.” Celie asks, “You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say?” Shug replies, “Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?” Shug reveals the secret teaching of the universe to Celie: “everything that is or ever was or ever will be” wants our attention, and through that attention, our admiration.

The idea that it “pisses God off” if we don’t notice the beauty in nature was a central theme in the work of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and is perhaps reflected best in her paintings of flowers. O’Keeffe was troubled that no one saw flowers, deeply saw them. In the exhibition catalogue to the show “An American Place,” she wrote, “Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time—and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.” She offered her own remedy for that sin: painting close-ups of single flowers on oversized canvases. She wrote, “If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

And what do we see when we look closely at the expressions of nature? The author Henry Miller stated: “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself” (Henry Miller on Writing). Artists and creators do just that—even if they are attending to some small part of the world, they elevate that small part so we can see it as mysterious, awesome, an indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Deep creativity is mysterious.

O’Keeffe’s flower paintings did this for me. She taught me how to see flowers, how to appreciate their unique and marvelous display, especially their sensual insides, the stamen and the anther and the pistil—that I even know these words is because her rendering of them made me curious. After I caught the photography bug, I frequented parks, botanical gardens, and nurseries in order to find and photograph a wide variety of flowers. Once a “busy New Yorker” visiting on holiday for six weeks, I would stop by the neighborhood bodega and bring home a different flower every few days. I created a small studio in my sublet, consisting of a black sheet taped onto a chair and a desk lamp moved to the floor to offer directional lighting. There, I painstakingly photographed each single flower from multiple angles over the course of hours, really taking the time to see each flower like you see a good friend—as an utterly unique and incredibly magnificent world in itself.

“HEAVEN IN A WILD FLOWER”

The poet William Blake taught us to see the magnificent in the mundane, imploring us in “Auguries of Innocence” “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Besides my New York flower series, my other favorite flower series starred some wildflowers that captured my attention, teaching me about the Heart that beats in the center of all creaturely things, great and small.

Unlike my New York bodega flowers, I did not intentionally set out to find and photograph these wildflowers—they found me instead. I was spending the summer in Big Sky, Montana, and my host told me that I should hike down Ousel Falls Park Trail to photograph the waterfalls. Of course, they were magnificent, as waterfalls are, and I took the requisite shots. But on the way back from the walk, I found my attention drawn to the small yellow wildflowers peppering the trail. From a distance, they were not so magnificent, but up close they were wonders. I marveled at their diversity of expression, their hardiness, and their foolhardiness, as they sheltered in nooks and bloomed in crannies. While hikers passed by me—and these flowers—on their way to the falls, I kneeled, squatted, crouched, stooped, stretched, and got down and dirty—whatever it took to capture each flower in its particular glory.

I came to visit them every day, at different times of the day, marveling at how the changing light changed them too and at what a difference a day could make in their opening up toward life, in their closing down toward death. I wanted—no, I felt compelled—to witness their very short and wondrous life spans through taking portraits of each one. As Jan Phillips writes in God Is at Eye Level, “Making a portrait of someone is an honor and a privilege. It is an opportunity to look deeply into another, to see the essence of spirit as it sweeps across the surface. To do this the photographer must cross a certain threshold, enter into the presence of another being with full attention. The encounter is a holy moment, a time of communion, a chance to reflect and reveal another dimension of the Divine.”

These little yellow flowers, which I would later research and come to know as Arnica montana, invited me to cross that certain threshold. Looking deeply at each flower, I began to feel like I knew them, recognizing each one. It may sound silly to say, but it seemed that each flower had a heart, or was its own display of the many ways the heart manifests. I named the flowers for these displays, names like “The Forgotten Heart,” “The Shy Heart,” and “The Throwing Caution to the Wind Heart.” In a beautiful reversal between subject and object, I came to realize that by paying attention to the flowers, by tending to them and communing with them, they were tending to me, touching and opening my heart and enriching my heart’s vocabulary with image language that spoke louder—and perhaps clearer—than words. And what was in it for the flowers? I imagine my photography was one way of saying to them, “You were born, you bloomed, and you were noticed.” How easy it is to assume that the Other does not care, especially if the Other is nature, and yet as Shug reminds us, “Everything want to be loved.” We know from studies that plants, when talked to lovingly, thrive. We know from these studies that we can wither them with our thoughts of malice. Might we imagine these flowers were touched by the attention? Might we wonder if the Heart that beats in the center of all creaturely things quickens with our admiration?

Deep creativity is reciprocal.

Or are Alice Walker and I just projecting our nature onto nature? One of my favorite authors, David Abram, states in his book Becoming Animal that this is a key question: “Are we not simply projecting our own interior mood upon the outer landscape of nature?” Because Walker and I and O’Keeffe and Miller and Blake and Hillman and even the Zen master want attention, are we projecting onto nature the desire for attention? “And so,” Abram continues, are we “making ourselves, once again, the source and center of the earthly world, the human hub around which nature revolves?” For him, the answer is no, with a brilliant caveat: “not if our manner of understanding and conceptualizing our various ‘interior’ moods was originally borrowed from the moody, capricious earth itself.” As Abram imagines it, we don’t see the soul in the eyes of an animal because we are projecting our own soul, but rather, the reverse—we see the soul in our own eyes because we learned about soul from animals. Because we have seen the peacock, we dress up in colorful clothes and strut our stuff on a Saturday night. Because we have seen the tree dance with the wind, we move our looser limbs and make our own wind to dance with. Because we have noticed the color purple in nature, we paint our own toenails purple and walk through the world-field with ten petals in our shoes.

Rather than the human hub around which nature revolves, we are nature within nature, and we are never alone. So what causes photographer Diana Michener’s sense of isolation that she breaks through photography? As Abram sees it, “In truth, it’s likely that our solitary sense of inwardness (our experience of an interior mindscape to which we alone have access) is born of the forgetting, or sublimation, of a much more ancient interiority that was once our common birthright—the ancestral sense of the surrounding earthly cosmos as the voluminous inside of an immense Body, or Tent, or Temple.” We are all and always insiders, always inside nature, as nature is always inside us—we share a body, and that body is sentient. Abram writes, “Sentience was never our private possession. We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom.”

Deep creativity is ensouled.

HALLOWED BE THY NAME

My creative practice of photography has provided me with so many benefits and blessings. It’s gotten me out of my head and in to the world. It’s healed my broken heart and bolstered my spirit and deepened my soul through encounters with the holy Other of nature, while reminding me that I too am nature, that I too am creature. I too am an animal with ensouled eyes that speak a great language. I too am a flower with my big heart on display. I too am creative, as nature is unfathomably creative.

Martin Buber writes in On Judaism, “Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you.” Our creative practices in nature all have the potential to hallow nature, our shared “immense Body, or Tent, or Temple,” while reminding us that we too are hallowed by nature. Hallow the geese with your poem, and they will sing of your belonging. Hallow the color purple in a field with your novel, and be reminded of God’s equal delight with you. Hallow the flowers with your photographs, and they will hand you back your heart.

What are we waiting for?

Hallow. Hallow. Hallow.

EXERCISES

Jennifer invites you to these reflections.

I speak a great deal about the healing power of nature in this essay, about how nature reminds me of my place in the family of beings. In what ways is nature healing for you? If you are in need of healing right now (and aren’t most of us now and always?), how might you turn your attention to nature for healing?

“What was in it for the flowers?” I asked in my essay. What are your thoughts about this? Have you ever felt a sense of nature’s delight in your attentiveness? Have you experienced the joy of a true encounter with nature that feels truly reciprocal?

How have you hallowed nature in your creative work? Would you welcome the opportunity to do that more? If so, how might you find, or make, the time to do so?

Can you create something from these reflections?

Jennifer invites you to this practice.

NATURAL OBSESSIONS

In my essay, I describe times in my life where I have given way and sway to “natural obsessions,” like photographing the Arnica montana flowers, or covering a wall with animals. Once, when I lived on a mesa that had a perfect one-mile walking loop around it, I challenged myself to see something new on every single walk for a month, so I would stay awake (get out of my head and in to the body of the world).

In this practice, I invite you to give yourself weekly or monthly nature assignments, where you concentrate your attention on one element of nature, whether it be animal or flower, tree or grass, sky or water, color or sound. Allow yourself to get obsessive about knowing this element fully and complexly. Capture that element in differing light in any creative format.

Perhaps one summer month you will choose Bee because bees hang around your backyard in droves. Commit to spending time with those bees. Study how they fly and watch how they land upon the yellow flower of the tomato plant. Note the particularity of their sounds when they come close enough to your ear. Count how many seconds they stay on any given flower. If they land for long enough, notice their color and all the different textures on their bodies. Then, write a poem for Bee. Hell, write a poem every day for Bee (or at least a haiku!). Or teach yourself to dance like Bee or write a Bee-inspired piece of music. Learn about your own creativity from Bee (“When do I need to fly away from something? What’s my hive that I need to return to for rest?”).

Perhaps in another month, you’ll allow yourself to be obsessed with Yellow. Wherever you go that month, you’ll be on the lookout for yellow. Maybe you’ll spend an afternoon in a local museum, looking everywhere for yellow, or maybe you’ll open an art book on van Gogh to look through all the images for his use of yellow. Maybe you’ll go to the grocery store to look at all the yellow foods (I once took my nephew and niece on a “red picnic” where we could only buy red foods from the grocery store—that was eye-opening! We ate a lot of strawberries and mostly food dyed red!). Maybe it will be fall, and you’ll notice the differing hues of yellow on the leaves of the tree in your backyard. Allow your obsession with Yellow to inform your creativity. You might learn to make homemade mustard to sell at your farmer’s market, or brighten your kitchen with lemon-colored paint, or plant sunflower seeds in a dirt patch at your kid’s school, or make a collage of van Gogh’s yellow elements.

Get obsessed!

Creativity, Nature, and the Field of Play

Dennis

Being in the natural world always inspirits me. I think better, I imagine more freely, and I feel more deeply. What follows is a thin but important slice of a three-and-a-half-month pilgrimage taken years ago that changed me in ways both permanent and mysterious. Remembering it in words continues to make it real on deeper levels beyond its literal events.

I drove north of Portland to Sauvie Island where I hiked along the Columbia River on a beautiful cool sunny day, a gift God had given me without conditions. I watched enormous cargo ships glide up the river as I hiked to a lighthouse through the forest and amidst herds of cattle whose quiet but powerful presence made me very skittish. These cud chewers looked at me suspiciously from above very rheumy noses. I climbed a fence and walked with great deference past two bulls whose startled gazes suggested that I might have designs on their harem. I tried to appear small and harmless to signal clearly that these beautiful cows grazing serenely in the sunlight were just not my style. But they were lovely.

I observed and moved within such a welcoming natural terrain with new eyes. It was a revelation to see throughout nature how the living and the dead existed side by side and how new life sprang fresh from the decay of old matter. Some clotty soil suddenly let go along the bank of the river and plopped into the flowing stream. Motion and stillness, give and take, new life from old—the patterns continued to surface, and I sensed that what had been invisible to me for so long was now revealing itself directly before me through nature’s eternal rhythms. All is revelation, all is relation, all is realization. The leaves, covered with dirt, reentered the earth, having descended from great heights. It was fall and all was falling, returning to the earth, completing an ancient cycle whose rhythm I could feel deep in my flesh. These leaves had their short life upstairs in the branches, then burst into color close to their destined end. Now, many of them already crispy brown, returned to replenish the soil for next year’s growth. I realized in this simple observing that the newly created cannot happen without a counter motion of death and dying. Something must always be sacrificed, given up, let go of to create space for the creation of something new. Clinging to what has been and is end-stops a new beginning; such is the mythic round of nature within me and around me, at once swirling into death and rising into new life. No wonder one of my favorite painters, Paul Cézanne, instructed other painters to observe the patterns and performances in nature to improve their works. His letters have become beacons of artistic insight for subsequent artists. He writes, for example, on April 15, 1904, to Emile Bernard: “But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.”

Deep creativity is alchemical.

At the vanguard of Impressionism, Cézanne wanted to create a representation of nature through color and texture. But first he sought to observe nature’s true profile in all its subtleties. He writes to a friend, “I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant” (in Artists on Art). Out of his observation arose the creative products that were to define one of the art world’s most significant original achievements. I was, at the same time, walking within the landscape that inspired such a novel way of depicting the natural world.

A SPIDERWEB AND THE INVISIBLES

As I walked along the river, a leaf, acting very forward, spiraled down and landed on my cap. It wanted a last horizontal ride before finally falling onto the riverbank. I obliged it. Water spiders jerked along the slick calm liquid surface; the Columbia River, deep and silent, flowed without a ripple. Leaves that had landed on the water floated on the surface while their shadows followed and mirrored in shadowy similitude their twin floating along the shallow water close to shore. Dead logs and branches lined the muddy bottom. Leaves quietly hosted the sun, palms softly facing out. A leaf bobbed and weaved in a meandering descent into the river. Sounds began to multiply under the thick bushes to my left. A spider’s web caught the sunlight in its gentle sway and for just an instant, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the filaments of perfect symmetry. This scene was too delicious to pass by, so I sat for a moment on an adjacent log to enjoy the patient and confident engineering of the web, still wet from last night’s moisture that the early morning sunlight exposed. I sensed it was the pattern inherent in the web that aroused my interest and arrested me in the moment.

Then, as I gazed at the web, it suddenly disappeared. For a moment, I thought I had hallucinated it. But the sun’s light had in fact shifted just a shutter to the right to make it disappear. I knew the web was right there, almost where I could reach and touch it in its invisible manifestation between the two small shrubs, an invisible presence now, yet I knew its existence was a matter of inches from my face. I wondered in that moment how many other webs were right in front of me that I did not see because the attitude of the light hid them or my own attitude disallowed their revelation. According to some physicists, we have visible to us only about 4 percent of the created order; the rest remains in hiding. Okay. But then there are moments like this. As I shifted my position only inches on the log, the spiderweb appeared once more to me as the sun caught it again, making it magically visible. So it must be that we can, depending on our disposition, see parts of the universe that may become visible when we are seated correctly or find the right oblique angle for their appearance. It needn’t move, but I must be willing to. I thought that this phenomenon could also reveal God to us through moments of grace, if grace were understood as a gift by which we are given an angle of vision of God. Grace is a light which, when slanted in the right attitude, reveals what is invisibly before us, pulsing its own reality, daring to be seen by anyone who is graceful enough to see. I felt welling up in me a gratitude inspired by grace and the gift of the imagination to be aware of what is now invisible, now visible. I also felt that nature, like me, needed to engage in a conspiracy with others in order to come into creation. Creativity itself is a conspiracy of several forces that together can expose what is hidden directly before us. Patience, however, is needed. Also indispensable is a willingness to see.

At this moment, sitting along the Columbia River on a log contemplating a peek-a-boo spiderweb and delighting in how little I really need to enjoy the mysteries of the world, I understood how no boundaries exist between the physical and spiritual creations, between the natural order and supernatural presences, between the world’s tangible body and its invisible gracefulness. It was an instance of grace, freely given and gratefully taken. I found myself in the thick of the give-and-take of creation. All the low points—the loneliness, the feelings of depression, of sadness, of grief, of emptiness, of loss, of wanting to head home—evaporated in the face of this spiderweb, which had once more playfully disappeared. Its ability to remain on the margin between visibility and invisibility was its strength and its attraction; the insects it wanted to ensnare had eyes so multifaceted and keen that only a web that played between concealment and revelation could ever hope to snag them. This web’s presence, when perceived, was akin to the effects true praying and authentic poetry had on the senses. Both of them made visible what was hidden in plain view, just in front or next to us or coming up from behind. Our failure was in lacking the right attitude by which to see it. Again, in Artists on Art, Cézanne is brilliant in his observation: “Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them [illustrious predecessors], let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments.” Voices headed toward me on the path. Nature suddenly dissolved in all her majestic sleight of hand as sounds of hikers rolled down the trail from the ridge just above. How sensitive and fragile was solitude; it dissipated the moment voices invaded the web of its space. Later I sat and tried to capture something of the spiderweb experience in a different register. The spider’s web had coalesced something in the order of nature with my own creative psyche.

Deep creativity is reciprocal.

Deep creativity is idiosyncratic.

ZEN WEB

The spider’s mandala

rests serenely anchored, a large enmeshed

wheel between two scrub bushes linking forest and river.

The sun gives it shape and angle of clear vision.

It vanishes when the sun blinks

behind a swaying leaf.

The spider rests Zen-like at the center,

in perfect Zazen waiting praying proud of its design it

spun from a memory it did not recall it had.

Only when the web fades, becomes a clear

force does the spider move wavily in midair

above the ground toward a small moth

flapping against the sticky filaments of Zasheen.

Two scrub bushes, keeping the tension of the moth

between them, bow slightly toward one another.

Buddhists of the forest embrace the flame of death.

That night at my campsite I discovered that I was the only one with a pitched tent. All the other residents had packed up. I thought for a moment of the risks of being alone but decided that this was a rich opportunity to enjoy the solace and solitude of the natural order. I built a fire as the sun set and prepared a simple meal on my camp stove. The air, still and cooling, gave my small campfire a warmer, cozier glow; I pulled my chair closer to enjoy the deep silence of the forest.

But soon I felt something like a wash of affection for myself and for my surroundings stir in me. Without a thought, I rose from my chair and walked over to one of the friendliest looking redwoods on the periphery of my campfire light and placed my hand on it. Its thick spongy bark was still warm to the touch, like human skin, from the sun’s heat; its warmth mixed with the cooling night air. I felt great affection for this tree and was tempted to name it. Never before had I felt such a connection and regard for something in nature. What had changed in me? Some opening, some aperture, had been unlocked and the tree was now present as a living being rather than a static silent object. I leaned up against it in the deep solitude of darkness and stillness and was overcome with a strong desire to weep and embrace its warmth.

This old redwood I felt pass right through my pores and enter me. My desire to be physically connected to it increased, so I leaned my whole body against it in the isolated silence of the expansive park. I followed its massive trunk as far as I could up to the cluster of branches and needles that disappeared into the night sky. My astonishment grew when I gazed at a dark sky so lit with stars that their mass rivaled the darkness between them. At this moment, I felt a deep sense of joy and liberation, an unfathomable sense of freedom that I had forgotten was possible.

Deep creativity is aesthetic.

This was a profound moment of grace’s presence in my life, coming to me now as a gift. Grace I suddenly understood to be a gift of freedom, of a full liberation from one’s self and a welcome respite from a life that had grown far too busy to be enjoyed. I felt Grace emanating from this ancient tree that fed me with its warmth. Love in its gentle but powerful force liberated me. I realized that this befriending of a tree in a forest was a moment of creative self-knowledge, a knowing by means of nature’s wisdom. Yielding to the natural order of things in their particularity was a moment of profound creation. Any distinction between natural and spiritual worlds collapsed in this experience, where alone and just outside the perimeter of my glowing fire in the silence and solitude of a magnificent redwood forest, I experienced the bottomless reflective nature of fathering itself. This old forest tree was my image of the father, and it fathered me in the darkness.

I returned to my fire and sat in my campsite chair for a moment. I glanced back into the darkness where the tree stood, still and friendly and welcoming. Its silence evoked images, which bubbled up of their own volition; I simply wrote in my journal what I heard.

TREE SKIN

Listen then deeply into the tree’s skin

below the cragged black bark and deep patient

rhythm of age rough-hewn and weathered from

ten thousand sunrises, and

deeper still into the whorls of sandy-colored

shy moist pulp

the deep place where slowly in time its rings

move out to find the light and mark its time.

If you must wound the tree, first

touch its skin with your own palm face out.

Pause for a moment with the iron axe blade or steel saw

resting quietly by your side.

Try with eyes gently closed to discover

where your flesh ends and its skin begins.

Imagine the moist pulp hidden deep within

holding water from another age.

You may then sense in that instant that you are

now a branch full of leaves of what you wish

to bring down.

Your feet and toes have already begun

to bud themselves

into the loam beneath you.

Hearing these words and writing them calmed me; I realized why a sense of the sacred had become a more pronounced attraction during this trip. Nature had her own poetic rhythms, eddies, swirls, and contours. Written poetry was a way of experiencing the sacred, most especially in the natural order, for indeed nature had her own order of being. This entire campsite as well had become a gift in its simplicity and solitude, offering me yet another experience through which I could learn to be present to a life lived too often in the fast lane.

I discovered great solace in my solitude at the campsite; it was a wonder, a wonder of abundance. I felt this largesse fully in the moment, in the darkening of the day, which revealed as much as it concealed. How could I not have seen before now that the joy emerging from hiking or camping or connecting actively with nature was a joy and an opening? I was struck by the marvel of this world in a way not felt or acknowledged before. I never expected such power or such sympathy to surface from her presence; it stood as one of the most sublime moments of the entire pilgrimage and repeated itself on subsequent occasions.

My fire had dwindled into a glowing bed of red coals. The trees had disappeared into the deep darkness and silence of the night. The only sound, now that the birds too had nested until morning, was the distant thump of the waves washing ashore below me and the occasional crackling of a frisky twig or branch that wanted to speak from the fire. My breathing eased and all fear of being alone evaporated in the radiance of the burning wood. I knew that I was not alone, just solitary, and feeling as if I inhabited the present moment in a very ancient and timeless way. I did not know it then how important these discoveries of the natural world and the connection of poetry to prayer were to become in my future work. They resolved themselves into major points of meditation for the remainder of the pilgrimage. That night in my tent I slept the entire night and did not awake until I heard birds singing in the trees above me the next morning.

I enjoyed a wondrous walk in the state park the next afternoon. Splashed yellow light fell on all the waiting leaves. I expected or longed for or desired nothing, content just to accept and love what the world offered. Was this the feeling of paradox, a sense of an empty fullness? A full emptiness? I was perfectly at peace, devoid of all desires. I did notice that this feeling of serenity ushered in during my time in the natural order was an ordering principle of the soul. This gift of time and circumstance became a wonderful few hours hiking in the woods, tramping along the soft spongy earth, listening to the birds scattered in the sunlight within the trees, and simply paying attention to everything I saw. The day was a gift and healed me from the inside out as the sun warmed me from the outside in.

I invite the reader into the above landscape as a place to reflect on the feelings that nature incites in each of us. For it is a landscape in accord with the deepest rhythms of our own embodiment, the pulsing flow of the blood, the rhythmic beat of the heart, and the give-and-take of our inner vitality with nature’s own eternal rhythms and eddies. The hardest move for me in nature was to stop thinking and to sense other depths of being aware that the natural order encourages in all of us. I also discovered that simply stopping and resting on a fallen tree, a bench, or on the ground for a few minutes allows the hidden life of nature to reveal itself. Suddenly squirrels appear, birds punctuate the sky, one sees a nest high up that would be missed if one were busy walking. And then to listen within, for as the natural order stirs images within, ideas begin to form and remembrances increase. All of these comprise creative moments when one allows the life in the everyday to capsize for a while so that other life forms can voice their presence into the soul.

Deep creativity is emotional.

EXERCISES

Dennis invites you to these reflections.

When I was at the campsite, I felt many emotions like wonder, joy, opening, sympathy, and power, and all of these appeared to me like grace. When and where have you been graced by nature? What were the emotions that attended your experience?

I write about “creative moments when one allows the life in the everyday to capsize for a while so that other life forms can voice their presence into the soul.” How are you doing with capsizing your everyday life? Are you allowing enough time to overturn the mundane and enter the Sacred in order to cultivate more creative moments?

How do you understand the experience of solitude? What or who does it call up in you? What does solitude remind you to remember?

Can you create something from these reflections?

Dennis invites you to this practice.

TOUCHING YOUR OWN NATURE THROUGH THE NATURAL ORDER

In my essay, I write about seeing patterns in nature reflected in my own body and my life. For example, I contemplated the falling leaves, and “I realized in this simple observing that the newly created cannot happen without a counter motion of death and dying.” Seeing the spiderweb appear and disappear, I realized that “we can, depending on our disposition, see parts of the universe that may become visible when we are seated correctly or find the right oblique angle for this appearance.” Becoming one with the old redwood, “I felt a deep sense of joy and liberation, an unfathomable sense of freedom that I had forgotten was possible.”

These insights, and the healing and feelings they engendered, came to me as grace. I didn’t seek out this grace or consciously court nature to reveal her wisdom, but nonetheless, she provided. But with this practice, I want to suggest you do just that—seek nature’s grace; court nature to reveal her wisdom. Then yield to the unexpected.

1. Begin with a question that’s on your mind regarding your creative practice such as, “Why am I feeling so blocked these days?” or “How can I better deal with those rejection slips I’ve been receiving?” or “How can I better protect my solitude so I give more of myself to my creativity?” I suggest writing this question down, being intentional about every word, taking the time to write it just right.

2. Close your eyes and ask for nature to tell you exactly where she’d like you to go to contemplate the question and perhaps find the answer. Maybe she’ll suggest a local park, a walk around your neighborhood, or even a corner of your backyard. Follow her lead and go there.

3. With question in hand (or at least in your pocket), walk to and through this place (slowly, slowly), repeating your question.

4. Allow yourself to be drawn to something in the natural order that might have wisdom to share. Lean against it; kneel down before it; sit with it. Listen deeply as it speaks to you. Trust its wisdom. Accept its grace.

5. Take notes while you are in the space or make notes upon your return. Honor the wisdom and grace you’ve received by creating something from it or something with it.