It’s 2:53 am. I’m in the Bahamas. Bahamas, North Carolina that is, staying with a subscriber on my journey around the south.

The following somewhat random reflections on the sources of personal power are not directly applicable to either “A Pause For Beauty” or “Creativity As A Way of Life,” but they underlie everything that flows out of Heron Dance, and my own personal quest. I wanted to spend some time consolidating my own thoughts on the subject. They may eventually form the basis of a new book. The questions raised are important to journaling.

When I interview people — people engaged in creative work, people who climb the world’s highest mountains, people who serve those in situations of hopelessness — I always ask where they get the power to accomplish unusual things. This power is completely different of course than the power to destroy, to wage war, to dominate, to manipulate. I want to know about the power to contribute something to humanity, or to nature for instance by protecting wilderness. I want to explore the power to create something unique, something difficult and positive. The power to survive adverse, life-threatening conditions. Most of all, I want to know about the power to manifest a vision.

Here are some notes and thoughts from interviews and from my own efforts to generate the internal power to manifest a vision.  

Whenever I think about internal power, the first interview that comes to mind was that of Gruffie Clough, Colorado Outward Bound Instructor. In addition to Outward Bound, Gruffie has guided senior executives of major corporations up Mt. Kilimanjaro on team building exercises, spent long periods of time kayaking alone to remote villages along the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya to build clinics and schools, and consulted with corporations on community development projects for their workers in developing countries. She’s a truly remarkable person.

You can read excerpts from our interview here, but summarized, this is how she responded to my question on the source of her power. 

You gain power over your circumstances, over the obstacles you face by gaining power over yourself, over your fears, your desires and your procrastination. You gain power by not giving up when you feel like giving up. You gain power by knowing your limits and by working within them. You gain an understanding of your weaknesses, and work within them, so that they don’t defeat you. It’s very spiritual and a little bit Eastern. You gain power by letting it go. You let go of position and possessions. You acknowledge your vulnerabilities and then focus on what you can accomplish within those. I don’t recall her using the word “clarity,” but much of what she had to say related in one way or another about being clear with oneself, and being clear about the objective.

Gruffie didn’t talk about it, but the subtext was you gain power through sacrifice in service of a goal. You give up some things to accomplish a more important result. By working within your limits, your limits expand. More importantly, you focus effort on what you actually can accomplish. Focusing effort where it can achieve maximum results is key to building your power. Internal power and momentum grow with accomplishment.  

The source of all power capable of achieving a significant positive result is generated out of your relationship with yourself. Your resourcefulness is generated out of your internal world. It is generated out of harmony with your inner world, a harmony that needs to be nurtured. It doesn’t just happen.

. . .

Gandhi’s life and writing are of particular interest in the study of internal power. Without guns or bullets he defeated British colonialism, the most powerful country in existence at the time.

Strength does not come from physical capacity. 
It comes from an indomitable will.
      - Gandhi

Perhaps the single most important action Gandhi took was his leadership of the Salt March, a twenty-four-day march in 1940 that led to the abolishment of an onerous tax on the sale of salt. The tax was particularly punitive against poor Indians. Prior to embarking on the Salt March, Gandhi spent three months listening to the opinions of others, and meditating. Before action, thought.

If we cannot wait,
we cannot know the
     right time to move. 

If we cannot be still,
our actions will have
     gathered no power.
- Friends of Silence

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.
- T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”, the first of the Four Quartets, republished in Eliot’s Collected Poems. 

Stephen R. Covey said that much of the inspiration for his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book that sold 40 million copies, came from three lines he encountered in a library in Hawaii. He couldn’t remember the author’s name or the title of the book. Research suggests that both Rollo May (The Courage To Create) and Victor Frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning) explored this theme in their work. 

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

It doesn’t matter much who originally wrote it. Our power comes from thinking before acting, from the still point. 

Patience means self-suffering. . .
Truth means not the infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self.
      - Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi the Man

There is a push and pull between persistence and focusing on the right things. Some paths give you energy, some take it away. On some paths, your inner life gains from the work, and your work gains from your inner life. A sign you are getting it right — you feel your power, your energy building. On some paths life reaches out to you and presents synchronicities. There are currents flowing around us that seek to grow. Hooking into them, serving them, enhances your power and that of a life force.  

On other paths, everything is a struggle. All creative paths involve struggle — struggle with yourself as much as struggle with making a living. Once again, time is important. You need time to think through whether persistence with a project slow to unfold is needed, or a change of direction. There is power in knowing the difference. Will this project, this action, this friendship, this relationship, give me power or diminish it? Lots of things I’d like to do, I realize upon reflection, will dissipate my power.

. . .

The accumulation of a reserve is another source of personal power. Reserves — financial reserves, reserves of energy built through downtime, rest, vacations — allow us to pour love and patience into a work. Downtime allows us an opportunity to build our relationship with our inner world. Rested, the brain has tremendous, unknowable power. Reserves allow us the time to think things through carefully. Reserves reduce stress. Reserves allow us time to experiment, to make mistakes.

A reserve adds power to a creative work because it allows for the work to evolve, to flower, at its own pace. The first interview in the first issue of Heron Dance was of filmmaker Frédéric Back who made the Oscar-award winning animated film The Man Who Planted Trees. Over a period of years following our interview, Frédéric became a friend, a supporter of Heron Dance and a source of inspiration. I interviewed him a number of times. In one interview he said to me:

"It is fantastic to spend a long time creating a work of art. The search for beauty is without end. To make a kind of physic work you need time to reflect and rework. When you come to the end, you see the beginning differently. Time is not money. Time is our most precious possession. No money can buy time. The message of Jean Giono's book also touches on that — with time comes power. We can use it to improve or to destroy."

Time allows the creative person to dig deep into the essence of a subject — deeper than others may be willing to go in their rush to get a work off to market.

Your passion is your source of power. Doug Peacock, ex-Vietnam Green Beret, author of a number of books including the recent Was It Worth It?, wilderness protection activist, and the real life person on which Ed Abbey’s character Hayduke (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!) is based, said to me in our first interview:

The notion of following your passion is a cheap instinct and a good instinct and it's worth indulging. Your passion is your source of power. In order to have power, you have to live a life of passion. You have to live a really full life. You need to follow those paths, no matter where they lead. . . in defiance of all things conventional, perhaps. And, of course, it is at a price. It's going to cost. You have to know that going in. But the price you pay, in my opinion, is not worth the time of day to think about. It is so important not to kneepad around the world. You should never bow down to anything but those you love and respect. Ever. For anything.

. . .

There is power in clarity, in a strong, clear passionate vision. Clarity about oneself is rarely achieved. I’ve known a wide range of people in life, from hedge fund managers who are highly successful on Wall Street, to artists and writers to people who live successfully in the woods with lots of books and few other possessions, to people who volunteer to work in refugee camps and prisons. As you might imagine, these people have vastly different personalities but they do possess a common characteristic: They have a clarity about who they are and what is important to them. Distractions make clarity difficult; we live in a distracting culture.

There are so many directions to go, so many places to see, books to read, interesting people to meet, things to do. They can’t all be done in a one life. Focus is required. In finding water, one hole a hundred feet deep offers more promise than a hundred holes one foot deep. In living a spiritual life, or a highly principled life, some attractive alternatives must be forsaken so that we can live in harmony with what we believe. Living in harmony with our beliefs is a prerequisite to living a good life. It is difficult.

In art too, clarity has power. Great art offers a new way of seeing life. An artist who is wishy washy, who doesn’t know what he or she really cares about, has little to offer no matter how refined the technique.  

Clarity attracts energy. Unfortunately that applies as much to dictators and despots as it does to messiahs. Some of what clarity attracts are in the human world — people, resources — and some of a higher order.

Clarity makes self-discipline and sacrifice possible. Clarity allows those who possess it to do things others won’t do or never get around to doing. People with clarity have a fierceness about not doing things that are counterproductive, that distract from what is truly important. When I go deeper, and confront what I’d really rather not confront, I ask myself whether or not I believe I am worthy of my dreams. Do I believe in myself, and my values, enough to become the kind of person that I imagine could be?

If clarity was easy, we’d probably all do it. I believe that clarity is at the core — the first art — of the arts of a well-lived life. Dreams backed by clarity have a strange tendency to become reality.

. . .

In her interesting book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp, choreographer and MacArthur “genius” fellowship recipient proposes a series of questions by which we can better understand our creative lives.

What is the dumbest idea you’ve ever had? Thinking I could have it all.

What made it stupid? Its built-in futility, given how I work. To lead a creative life, you have to sacrifice. “Sacrifice” and “Having it all” do not go together. I set out to have a family, have a career, be a dancer, and support myself all at once, and it was overwhelming. I had to learn the hard way that you can’t have it all, you have to make some sacrifices, and there’s no way you’re going to fulfill all the roles you can imagine. We thought, as women in the sixties and seventies, that we could change everything and remake all the rules. Some things changed, and some things pushed back. What makes it stupid is that I set up a way of working that was in direct conflict with my personal ambition. Something had to give.

. . .

I have come to know simple truths that before were disguised by my complexity. I have come to know the inner vision that sees with much clarity. I've come to know me, the gentleness of my spirit, as it may express itself through love and tenderness. I've come to know power in a way that’s personal and creative. My personal power of choice. I've come to know love; love of self and others is the same. I've come to know the oneness of all who walk the planet in an attempt to journey home.
- Greta Metcalf

Ed Gillet, long distance sea kayaker, has embarked on many amazing trips including paddling alone 3600 miles up the west coast of South America (until his kayak was stolen by police in Ecuador, I think), and then later crossing the 2200 miles from California to Hawaii. That ocean crossing has never been successfully repeated by anyone, despite subsequent improvements in technology. I remember him as one of the most detached, cerebral people I've interviewed. He was reluctant to talk about the California to Hawaii trip, saying something like “Unless you've done a trip like that, nothing I can say will make much sense. And also, the memories of it are so deep and raw and painful, that I don't like to talk about it. It is very personal. Someday I might write about it.” I asked him about the source of his power to do these trips.

I start to build power on the first day, but don't feel like I’ve really achieved power until a couple of days into a trip. By then I’ve created power inside my center.  Inside my being.  The warrior spirit.  But you have to get out of this environment first. You have to go out in the hills.  Or on the ocean. Or on a mountainside. Out of what you are used to, because what you are used to is advertising and bills and people who want something from you.  When I leave, when it gets quiet, when there is no telephone ringing, no advertising messages bombarding in, I find the place where my power comes from. It comes from turning off the extraneous noises, deciding what you want and doing it. 

And then, when I come back, I find I lose my power in the face of all the distractions of living the consumer lifestyle.  It is really hard to keep your sense of what you want to do and where you want to go. 

I think that there are more or less powerful people who can sense things earlier.  More subtle cues.  You begin to find your power from the first step.  It’s exhilarating.  Pushing away from the bank and going down a whitewater river that you have never been down before.  After that, everything falls into place.  The power comes from that first step. What a lot of people can't accept is that there is no control. You can't see the entire journey. 

You have to take the first step. Be improvisational, intuitive.  I find that my powers of intuition at the end of a long trip are much better.  I am reacting to all kinds of stimuli.  Now, you get a freeway, and there are signs and places to get on or off and exits. It is programmed for them. You run down a track.  You can't do that when you are traveling in the wilderness, and the biggest wilderness is the ocean.  You can't program, you have to be intuitional. 

In whitewater paddling, the river is way more powerful than you are. If you fight it, it will take you down, destroy you. You learn to leverage off the river’s power. You put your paddle in the river at the point of maximum leverage where a small gesture generates major results. You wait for the decisive point, and then act. Gaining power in creative or other endeavors is similar. You reflect on points of leverage where small effort generates signficant results.

. . .

There is power in authenticity. You give up your power when you pretend to like someone or something that you don’t. You give up your power when you give in to rules or societal norms that you don’t believe in.

. . .

We seek to nurture our power in part to live life on our own terms. Our greatest possession is our life, our time on this planet. We want to spend it in our own way, according to our own values, making our own unique contribution. When you turn your back on the current underlying your life, you are on your own. You are coming at life believing that you are strong enough, powerful enough on your own. The other way is to come at life with humility. To surrender to the flow.

Life power is maximized when the design of a life fits the belief system of the person involved, and when that person lives with big dreams and the power of conviction.

The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.
- Life's Little Instruction Book

. . .

Journaling Questions:

What is your source of power? How do you nurture it? What can you do to enhance that power?

Have you experienced times in your life when you felt guided, in harmony with the current of your life, where a life force seemed to accompany you, amplify your efforts and present synchronicities? What contributed to the momentum, both inner and outer? What events precipitated the current’s flow?

Are you feeling an energy tug in your life – a direction the underlying current of your life wants to go? Is there a life force inside you searching for ways to grow? Are you trying to ignore it?

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Here’s a note from her:

Hello. My name is Rachael. I am older than dirt, and just about as attractive. I am grateful, though, for these years, and one thing I have learned is that often the best way to make something wonderful better is to share it. I look forward to Rod’s daily posts the way I look forward to getting together with my closest friends.  In some ways, it is like seeing a thrilling movie or going to a memorable concert  — together is better, even when it is what we now call “virtual.” 

A little story: When I was a child, my father and I had a very close relationship. He was a traveling salesman, so home only on the weekends. When I misbehaved, my mother’s most severe punishment was “I am going to tell your father.” Of course I usually misbehaved on Tuesday, and had all week to worry. On Friday I would run home from school and sit on the front porch to make sure I got to him first to give him my version of the misdemeanor. Every time his response was the same: “You agree that you did that and you understand why it was wrong? If so, you’ve learned your lesson. Remember it.” Throughout my childhood, if he saw me crying, he would put my head on his chest and cover the outside ear with his warm hand. Walking with you and Jim yesterday reminded me of how that felt. 

• * (Jim is the subscriber I’ve been staying with for a couple of days in Pfafftown, North Carolina)