Initial Draft Of Chapter Of My Upcoming Book:
Creating A Life Worth Living: 
The Art Of Living And Creating On Your Own Terms

Make room for random ideas to percolate under the surface of your life. Give them time to ripen.
Be receptive.
Listen.

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
- Jimi Hendrix

Three practices are particularly important to living a quality life on your own terms:

• An openness to messages that bubble up from deeper levels of consciousness.

• An openness to messages that descend from whatever Greater Powers may exist out there in the universe.

• After achieving clarity, act on the messages you receive. Work. Have self-discipline. Don’t procrastinate. Start now.

I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s new book The Creative Act, and watching interviews of him about creativity. There are a bunch of good ones online, but particularly interesting is one by Malcolm Gladwell on Broken Record.

For any not familiar with his background, Rubin is perhaps the most prominent music producer working today. He was one of the founders, along with Russell Simmons, of Def Jam Recordings, and later became co-president of Columbia records. He’s produced landmark albums by musicians as diverse as the Beastie Boys and Johnny Cash (Cash’s last album recorded just before he died — a remarkable work). He’s made hundreds of millions of dollars in the music business which is relevant because he’s written an important book on his creative process without having any financial need to do so.

In his book and in interviews, Rubin explores many aspects of the creative process, but most often and most profoundly he talks about receptivity. Be receptive to the Source, whatever that mysterious force may be. Listen. Meditate. Read. Pay attention. His whole demeanor is that of someone who listens carefully, talks little, is humble, contemplative and reflective. He’s waiting for messages.

He takes receptivity to the extent of looking for signs that may come from more than one friend suggesting or recommending something to him that he is biased against. He takes those recurring suggestions seriously in case it is the universe trying to bring an important new idea into his awareness.

Rubin’s Message Summarized

In order to make room in your life and consciousness for incoming messages, you need to be time efficient. Not rushed. You can’t rush from appointment to appointment, from overdue project to overdue project. Be thoughtful, wait for clarity. In the meantime, work slow. Protect your mental process, your interior stability. Avoid fights. Avoid overcommitting. Avoid people who are out of balance and inclined to waste their time and yours. Focus on projects and people that (who) multiply energy.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction.   Their random combinations are driven by forces we don’t know about.   
- Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

 

Why is it that I get my best ideas in the morning while I'm shaving?
- Albert Einstein

 

People who live close to the land attribute success not to skill or shrewdness, but to humility. The hunter should always be grateful. The emotional posture behind reason, even today, is humility. Where do you get humility? You get it from being alone and unarmed in places where you are in the food chain. Where we can encounter grizzly bears and mountain lions. We need that humility.
Can you imagine a situation where you either learn or you perish, where you either have a fundamental receptiveness or you don't make it?
- Doug Peacock, author, grizzly bear man, eco-warrior, real life person on which Ed Abbey’s Hayduke is based (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!). For more from Doug Peacock interviews see the Journal Page on the Heron Dance website.

. . .

Waiting for a vision.

The operative word is “waiting.” We wait. We can’t impose or feel bad if nothing comes.

The underworld, the inner world, is its own boss. It comes and goes as it wishes. We need to serve it before it will serve us.   It is shy, reticent and powerful.

Approach it with reverence, with humility. Ask for its guidance. Don’t tell it what you want. It won’t work if we try to impose on it our vision of success or our vision of the ideal outcome.

We meditate. We offer ourselves. Like ancient hunters in search of food for survival, we approach it with humility and receptiveness.

We listen. If it feels welcome, feels it has something to contribute over the cacophony of our lives, it says its piece. Often that comes in images and colors whose meaning is not readily apparent. The meaning will emerge over time.

So we wait.

. . .

Constantly Search For New Ideas, New Perspectives On Subjects Important To Your Work And Life

Read. Go to workshops. Study emerging technologies and trends in your field of expertise. Be open. This is particularly true if you are struggling, if your life and work lack flow.

These thoughts are hard won. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was aware of the emerging role of the internet, of Google paid adds and Amazon, and Heron Dance did, early on, develop a website with a shopping cart, take out paid Google and Facebook ads, and work hard to perfect SEO. But I ignored the tremendous new opportunities the internet offered content creators. These opportunities, had I taken the time to study them, could have helped me and Heron Dance avoid the downward spiral that developed out of the rapid growth of the business, in particular with regard to employees and suppliers. I was unable to manage these relationships, in part because I was focused on the art and writing, and in part because those relationships required skills that I don’t possess.

There is an aspect to “content creating” that I find distasteful and won’t participate in. There is an aspect to it that is manipulative and deceptive, as is characteristic of many business activities focused solely on profits, returns, and reducing customers to numbers and percentages. Nevertheless, experts in the emerging field of content creation in the early 2000s had important perspectives and techniques that, had I taken the time to study them and think them through, were applicable to Heron Dance, and could have helped me avoid years of heartache. The key is to expose yourself to what others have to say, think through the implications, and apply those insights that have integrity, that contribute to the quality of your work, and that help you serve others. I can see now that I failed to do that.

My conclusions:

• Read constantly in your field of work and expertise. What’s working and why?

• Go to workshops, seminars, presentations. Meet others in your field, in particular those with different approaches than those you apply. Pay particular attention to novel approaches that are successful.

• Travel. Get away. Emerge yourself in cultures and different ways of living. Give your mind time away from the day to day, and let new ideas percolate under the surface.

What Makes The Creative Person Tick?

I used to travel around North America asking artists about their lives.

I asked them what most occupies their imagination, what fascinates and perplexes them most about life. I asked them about inspiration and discipline, about rejection and persistence. I wanted to know about their spirit spark -- their dream world, their spirituality or meditation practice. I wanted to know where their work comes from -- what they do to relax, to find a core of peace -- a basis from which to create. I wanted to know what they strive to accomplish with their art.

Creative people are above all else people of ideas because all art is the expression of an idea. Creativity is a tasting of the water of our own essence. What has amazed me most about interviewing dozens of artists is the diversity of their interests, the breadth of their reading and life experience in areas seemingly unrelated to the medium they’ve chosen. Creative people live a rich, vast life under their work. I’ve found the process of exploring that inner life worthwhile and interesting.

I once asked advertising legend Carl Ally what makes the creative person tick. Ally responded, “The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because you never know when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But creative people have faith that it will happen.”
      — Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head

Art critic Sander Pierron wrote about Rodin.

“His Belgian friends remembered him as a young man with an obsessive interest in books. On his way home in the evening, if light permitted, he would stroll down the middle of the sidewalk, his nose in a book, bumping into people and quietly unaware of anything going on in  the outer world. He would arrive home without ever having heard   the angry reproaches of the people whom he had almost knocked over.”
        - Rodin, A Biography, Frederic Grunfeld

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy – or they become legend.
-   Jim Harrison, (1937-2016)