Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one ...
- Helen Keller, Midstream, My Later Life.
Helen Keller lost her hearing and sight due to illness at the age of nineteen months.
I walk almost every day in a beautiful nature preserve near my home. The quote below comes most often to mind as I walk.
One July afternoon at our ranch in the Canadian Rockies I rode toward Helen Keller's cabin. Along the wagon trail that ran through a lovely wood we had stretched a wire, to guide Helen when she walked there alone, and as I turned down the trail, I saw her coming.
I sat motionless while this woman who was doomed to live forever in a black and silent prison made her way briskly down the path, her face radiant. She stepped out of the woods into a sunlit open space directly in front of me and stopped by a clump of wolf willows. Gathering a handful, she breathed their strange fragrance: her sightless eyes looked up squarely into the sun, and her lips, so magically trained, pronounced the single word "Beautiful!" Then, still smiling, she walked past me.
I brushed the tears from my own inadequate eyes. For to me none of this exquisite highland had seemed beautiful. I had felt only bitter discouragement over the rejection of a piece of writing. I had eyes to see all the wonders of woods, sky and mountains, ears to hear the rushing stream and the song of the wind in the treetops. It took the sightless eyes and sealed ears of this extraordinary woman to show me beauty, and bravery.
- Frazier Hunt writing in Redbook
Below, two two-page spreads of this entry from the upcoming Heron Dance book
Meditations on Beauty and Mystery, A Gratitude Art Journal
which is scheduled for publication later this year.
Poet Galway Kinnell on work habits
Great improvisors are like priests. They are thinking only of their god.
- Stéphane Grappelli
I produce most and write best when I have no schedule at all, when I’m able to wander where whim carries me—both physically, through a city or a countryside, and mentally, in reading, talking, scribbling, thinking, whatever. Poems don’t come to me often when solicited. More usually it’s when I turn my back on them, and become absorbed in something that is not a poem—a thing, a creature, a moment, a face, a fantasy, a memory—that an understanding happens between me and that other, an understanding that brings with it its own words. Then I don’t feel I’m making up the poem; rather my pen has to race to keep up with words that seem to be given. I complain about time.
One can have a lot of time and yet feel one has very little. A person who wants an inner life needs what you might call “open” time—time that hasn’t already been filled before one enters it with minor concerns, little duties. The more conscientious a person is, the more easily small things force themselves into the consciousness. Precisely because they are so small one knows one can easily take care of them. I keep finding in my pockets old lists of errands that in hindsight are incredibly trivial. It’s the fact that the items are crossed off that’s so pathetic—the fact that I actually worried about these tasks and actually did them. Tillie Olson has written an essay on the penalties of postponing serious work for the sake of things of this kind. It’s a fine essay. She advocates going straight for the real work and to hell with everything else. And she’s right. The creative drive withers away otherwise.
On the other hand, she mentions how Rilke refused to go to his daughter’s wedding for fear that he would thereby miss writing the poem that might come to him that day were he to remain in his study. Rilke may be the greatest poet of the century—I happen to think that he is—but sometimes when I read one of his poems, I feel it’s exactly the poem a man would write while staying away from his daughter’s wedding—very spiritual so as to transfigure what in lesser spirits might be taken for callousness.
- from an interview published in the book Walking Down the Stairs
Downtime is the basis of creative time. It is important that that time not be filled with trivial things -- errands, doing the dishes, weddings -- but rather time to day dream, to meander through the backwoods, to wander around town, notebood in hand, just in case something bubbles up.
. . .
Below, the two-page spread of this entry from the upcoming Heron Dance book on living and working as a creative outsider,
Creativity as a Way of Life: Journal Meditations of a Working Artist
to be published sometime in 2025.
Two other books,
Meditations on Beauty and Mystery, A Gratitude Art Journal
&
Using An Art Journal to Probe Deep
are scheduled for publication later this year.
