No writer or artist challenges me as much as Henry David Thoreau. He would walk most mornings, all morning – a “self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms”. He talked of the quiet desperation with which most people live their lives. And, he said, “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” I’ve done some desperate things. I’ve worked not only through rainstorms and snow storms, but I’ve worked through beautiful spring days when my soul begged me to get out among the birds, new buds and flowers.

But of all of “Saint” Henry’s dictums, none challenges me more than this one:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful, but it is more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. We are tasked to make our lives, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of our most elevated and critical hour.

– Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

However difficult it is to paint a picture that represents my love of wild places, I find it much more difficult to live a life in harmony with my values, that is gentle and peaceful and, in particular, based on a gentle and peaceful relationship with myself. I’m not there yet, but I haven’t given up either.

I’ve interviewed roughly 150 people for Heron Dance over the last ten years. I’ve spent a fair amount of time alone in the woods. I’ve thought a lot about the challenges of finding peace with myself. From time to time, I write down what I’m learning. Sometimes when I’m done I conclude that I’ve come across some important answers. Sometimes I conclude I’ve learned very little about life despite having traveled a fair amount, embarked on a lot of different adventures and a few different business, experienced a lot of what is often called failure as well as some success. Despite what the best-selling books say, I don’t think ultimate truths can be reduced to a formula. The real truths are contradictory, illusory and revealed only in glimpses. And even harder than realizing them is living them.

But I’ve got to start somewhere, so for me, the arts of life, of inner peace, are dependent upon: – living in a way that enhances my relationship with my subconscious mind. – a close relationship with the natural world. – a slow life, a simple life, a minimum number of moving parts. – a creative life that celebrates the beauty of life.

Sometimes I’m willing to make the sacrifice those principles require, and sometimes I’m not. Even when I’m not, I think there is value in thinking the choices through carefully.

Four or five times in my life, I’ve touched something beyond words. I’ve been in places that filled me with both a deep joy and a deep peace. Those experiences nourish my life. They share the common characteristic of having occurred after spending a few days in a really wild place, usually but not always alone. All told, they amount to only a day or two. They make me who I am to me, who I am under the personas I subconsciously assume to negotiate my way in the world. Having said that, it amazes me, and discourages me sometimes when I think about it, how often in my life I have embarked upon work, upon commitments that have absorbed years of effort, that have nothing whatever to do with those experiences. In fact, I can say that I have spent most of my life living as if I was trying to prove that those precious experiences don’t matter. Writing this essay, I’ve resolved once again to put more of my internal power behind them. I’ve done that many times before.

Peace with one’s self, with one’s inner life, requires that we set aside other goals. Perhaps it requires that we set aside striving itself. A contemplative life, a quiet life, may be incompatible, for instance, with many ways of making a living. It may be incompatible with excellence at most human pursuits. Inner peace may be incompatible with certain people in one’s life. In my experience, for instance, a “contemplative presence” in the world of business is rare. I’ve had it for brief periods – usually when I’ve just come back from the woods. One needs an unusual amount of faith and confidence to relax into the flow. There are a lot of moving parts in the average business, and some have shiny teeth.

Sacrifice of some things that one gets enjoyment out of have a role in the life lived as art. Certainly other aspects are important too, and when those are accomplished, one finds still more important tasks ahead. Acceptance is certainly one – accepting those aspects of our life that are important but that are not peaceful, not beautiful. Being able to deal with those with integrity and dignity is a challenge worthy of the gift of life. Another is a friendship with one’s self, a close relationship with one’s subconscious mind, loving oneself, getting the reassurance and recognition of worthiness from within ourselves. I would say that that is a particularly noticeable characteristic of the people I’ve gotten to know well whose life is peaceful, who are at peace with themselves. Devoting a substantial portion of our lives to achieving financial success in an effort to appear “a winner” is not the road to inner peace. Nor do I believe abject poverty helps. Financial stability has its place in a low stress life.

In her interesting recent book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp, choreographer and MacAthur “genius” fellowship recipient proposes a series of questions by which we can better understand our creative lives. Here are a couple of examples she suggests we ask ourselves:

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.

She also suggests an exercise. Watch two people walk down the street together. Write down everything you see. Then, later, study your list and reach some conclusions. “Are they friends, would-be lovers, brother and sister, work colleagues, adulterers, neighbors who ran into each other on the street? Are they fighting or breaking up or falling in love or planning a weekend together or debating which movie they want to see?”

Then Tharp suggests doing the same thing with another couple, but this time write down only the things that you find interesting. She says that what is important is the difference between the two lists. “What you included and what you left out speaks volumes about how you see the world. If you do this exercise enough times, patterns will emerge. The world will not be revealed to you. You will be revealed.”

Achieving a clarity about one’s self, who you are, what you have to give and what you need to nourish your life is a rarely accomplished objective. Having known a number of people who have achieved unusual success in business, art, literature or the military, I would say that despite vastly different personalities and methods the common characteristic among them is a deep, even stunning, clarity about objectives. In her book, Twyla describes the necessity of having a clarity about the underlying theme of a work of art if one is to produce a meaningful and successful work. This applies as much to a painting as to a piece of music as to a dance performance that is totally without words. I’d like to take that one step further. I believe that to achieve a success in life, in the art of life in the way Thoreau means it, the first requirement is a clarity about one’s self. Probing oneself is uncomfortable work. My tendency is to say to myself “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Which brings me to the question, “How do I do it today?” Ira Progoff, in his book At a Journal Workshop has been helpful to me. I sit in a chair, a notebook within easy reach. I relax, starting from my feet and moving up my body. I breathe deeply and focus on my breath for a minute or two. Then I have a conversation with a person – the person I hope to become. I imagine myself an old man, a man living close to the land, living simply, a person of few words, a gentle person, a person familiar with hard physical work and deep rest. What does he have to say about the life I’m living, about my priorities?

I also ask him a series of other questions, and I write down in my notebook the answers I get back.

1. Describe two experiences in your life that were deeply profound, that when you return to them fill you with a sense of peace and joy.
2. What are the common characteristics of those experiences – where were you, what were you doing, what time of day was it?
3. What do those experiences tell you about where you find deep satisfaction in life?
4. What is preventing you from living a life built around those experiences?
5. Is there a way to use your life, or a portion of it, to serve that sense of peace?
6. If you were faced with no option but making major alterations to your life to orient your life around or to serve the experiences of your life that have brought you profound joy, what would you cut out of your life? What would you devote more time and attention to?
7. What are the major opportunities that life is presenting you that you may not be paying enough attention to?

Then I explore the other side of my life:

8. Describe two failures that you’ve experienced?
9. What led you to those points in your life? What were the factors that combined to lead you to take those roads in your life? (The major missteps of my life all arose out a minor mistake that created an adverse circumstance, that I reacted to in the wrong way which then led to a worsening situation, and then another wrong decision, etc. I’ve never, that I can remember, made a single decision that in itself created major havoc in my life. I call this the Vietnam syndrome – gradual escalation that leads to a solution much worse than the problem.)
10. Is there any area of your life that an impartial observer would conclude displays some of the characteristics of the failure scenario above?
11. What are the problems on the periphery of your life that seem to be building a momentum, despite your best efforts to ignore them?
12. Where in your life are you pursuing complex methods of achieving an objective with first putting serious thought into simple alternatives? In particular, is there an area of your life that requires major expense, waste, moving parts and people to be successful (i.e., direct mail) that could be as easily or more easily achieved with ingenuity?
Finally, I ask:
13. What can you do to enhance your relationship with your subconscious mind, the source of your creative life, of the deep enjoyment you get from solitude?