When we do the most creative work that we can possibly do, we get to the true heart of who we are.
Creating requires openness, flexibility, and ‘not knowing’:
In a meeting in late December 2006, the President of a small university asked me what course I wanted to teach in their Ph.D. Psychology program. Instead of responding with the curricula that I was already prepared to teach, to my surprise I found myself blurting out… “metaphor.” The topic was right there; there was…
In the physical sciences, we think the only world we know is what can be measured. But the creative lives in another realm. This realm, this ‘Other world’ slips into our day-to-day world in various ways—striking images, moments of exquisite beauty, intense dreams. It slips into our language through metaphor.
Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end.
When I was 26, I was involved in a head-on collision on a rural highway in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was flown by air ambulance to the Mayo clinic in Minnesota. I had fractured T-12 and displaced my spinal chord by 40 degrees. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic gave me less than…
Magda Cragg, speaking of her partner, the poet Lew Welch, said: He made space around you, so you could grow.”
The French writer Albert Camus wrote, “A man’s life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours…those one or two images in whose presence his heart first opened.” The poet Stanley Kunitz believed that writers have key images that captivated them as children, and they keep working these images over and over…