You might have noticed that I jump around a little bit with Heron Dance. I tell myself that I need to make it about a single, narrow subject – my favorite is the inner life underlying creativity – but when it comes right down to it, I want to write about the most interesting thing that is on my mind or that I come across that particular day.

So today, at 3:30 am, I wrote in my journal:

Objective: A Work Of Love

The objective: create beautiful books about creating a beautiful life. And to do that, live a beautiful life.

Every day ask yourself: 

What can I do today to create a beautiful book? 

To create a beautiful life?

. . .

It is important to constantly ask yourself: What is the objective? Why am I doing what I am doing?

There has been a little bit of chaos in my life lately related to getting my new book, Nurturing The Song Within, published and in the mail. The printer I contracted with was supposed to deliver the book March 22. That quickly became March 26, then April 6, then April 10, etc. and then the latest estimate April 27. With no guarantees. So I reluctantly switched to a different printer who said a week, maybe two after proof approval. The cost is substantially higher with this new printer, but fine. I’ll raise the price as soon as the books get back from the printer. But all of this has generated a certain amount of uneasiness in my life – lost sleep, frustration leading to anger. When things go wrong in my life, I tend to push harder rather than step back and try and figure out what is really going on.

The first question should be: if there is chaos in your life, look first inside. Is there chaos in your interior world?

Of course, there may not be. Interior chaos may not be the cause. Doing anything challenging and big tends to lead to unexpected setbacks. And this is the first book I’ve done in ten years so there are new suppliers. A new graphic designer. New printers. Setbacks are to be expected and if they are expected, shouldn’t lead to internal chaos. Whether they should or not, they did in this case.

So I woke up at 3am this morning asking myself: What is the objective? And when I meditated on that the answer came to me:

Create beautiful books about creating a beautiful life. To do that, first live a beautiful life.

Then everything kind of made sense, fell into place. The internal chaos disappeared. Everything in its own time, or something like that.

Then the thought, what can I share with Heron Dance readers about living a beautiful life? And the following quote immediately came to mind:

I’m enjoying life more fully now than I ever have . . . I don’t for a moment regret being seventy-two years old. It’s part of life, just like getting born was; just like being a jackass as an adolescent was. (Laughs.) And I’m continually, repeatedly discovering or having experiences sitting out in the yard and listening to the spring coming into the land, watching my purple martins, knowing that they’ve been all the way down to the southern tip of South America, have come back, found the same house — same hole in the house (laughs) — that they were raised in. This great capacity of life to renew itself. I think perhaps I’m more sensitive to that than ever before.
Robert Browning had Rabbi Ben Ezra say, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made” — that this is absolutely profound.
- John Henry Faulk, radio broadcaster, “Johnny’s Front Porch,” from The Search for Meaning by Philip L. Berman