Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness.

Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way. We may not be happy, but at least we know what we are — unhappy. Much fear of our own creativity is the fear of the unknown. If I am fully creative, what will it mean? What will happen to me and to others? We have some pretty awful notions about what could happen. So, rather than find out, we decide to stay blocked.

Work is the best antidote for savaged work. If we are engaged in making something new, we are less invested in the reception of something old. If we remember to keep our own counsel — "How did I like the work?" — then we are less likely to be blown apart by the judgment of others. Having a healthy forum of before, during and after friends is also an enormous help. We need those who love us and our work for the long haul and not for a hot-off-the-presses pick or pan.

If you feel stuck in your life or in your art, few jump-starts are more effective than a week of reading deprivation. No reading? That's right: no reading. It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shiel us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening become a vast savannah in which furniture — and other assumptions — get rearranged. We are cast into our inner silence. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our wellis running freely.

Writing, like jewelry design, is a series of choices that lead to a sense of something made — that something is "sense." Sense brings to the writer choice and, with choice, a sense of at least the potential for happiness.

As artists, we are perpetually seeking to penetrate the veil of cultural prescriptions and arrive at personal truth. In order to do this, we need to be brave enough with — and open enough to — our own internal territory that our art can express it. In orther words, we must be able to face down shame and choose self-disclosure. This takes courage.

Many recovering creatives sabotage themselves most frequently by making nice. There is tremendous cost to such erastz virtue. Many of us have a virtue out of deprivation. We have embraced a long-suffering artistic anorexia as a martyr's cross . We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior. Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature. This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial. For an artist, virture can be deadly. The urge toward respectability and maturity can be stulifying, even fatal.

When we are rickety, Morning Pages lend us stability. They miniaturize the terrors that we are walking through. They bring life back down to the possible: Exactly what can we do today? Taken in a daily bit, most change, however extreme, can be metabolized. Our Pages give us time and place to get used to change. When we remember that we have a daily life, we begin to find our grounding. It is our job, faced with impending to find our grounding. It is our job, faced with impending change, to continue to husband the life that we have got. It is our job to buy the kitty litter, call the plumber, keep our hand moving across the page.

Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist — hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch. Shadow artists judge themselves harshly, beating themselves for years over the fact that they have not acted on their dreams. This cruelty only reinforces their status as shaow artists. Remember, it takes nurturing to make an artist. Shadow artists did not receive sufficient nurturing. They blame themselves for not acting fearless anyhow.

Very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it. There is something enlivening about expanding our self-definition, and a risk does exactly that. Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges. Viewed this way, running a marathon increases your chances of writing a full-length play. Writing a full-length play gives you a leg up on a marathon. Complete the following sentence. "If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I would try ___________."

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again.

For those of us working to increase our creativity, it is always good to be out and about, especially on our feet. Walking, the simplest of tools, is among the most profound. It makes us larger than we are. When we walk, we wake up our consciousness. We enliven our senses. We arrive at a sense of well-being. We experience "conscious contact" with a power greater than ourselves. That still, small voice is automatically amplified a footfall at a time. "Solvitur ambulando," St. Augustine of Hippo is said to have remarked. "It is solved by walking."

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of wht you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. "Do not fear mistakes," Miles Davis told us. "There are none."

The lilies of the field begin as buds. We are asked to trust that just as they had a glorious and safe unfolding, so will we. In the natural world, we see butter-flies emerge from from awkward yet protective cocoons. We must remind ourselves to trust that sometimes we, too, are being protected in our growth. Our erraticism, our ungainliness, our panic — these, too, are natural to the passage of change. The Great Creator experiences all his creation in the throes of shifting identity. The unfolding saga of life on all levels is one of constant transformation, constant changing of form. When we cooperate with our need and desire to grow, we are cooperating with spiritual law.

Acting our way into right thinking is putting pen to the page even when the censor is shrieking. It is choosing to write even when writing feels "wrong" to us — because we're tired, we're bothered, we're any number of things that writing will change if only we will let it. Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring and makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail.

Drama in our lives often keeps us from putting drama on the page. Some drama happens and we lose our sense of scale in our emotional landscape. When this happens, we need to reconnect to our emotional through line. We need a sense of our "before, during and after life."

When we write, we "place" ourselves in our world. We say, "This is where I am, right now, and this is how I feel about that." Convrsely, when we focus on the places where we have been, we often connect to a deep and specific sense of how we felt when we were there. In other words, by mapping our literal, physical placements, we are often able to more accurately map our psychological placement. Good writers know this.

It is the ego's dicey proposition that as artists we should always be "special" and different. The ego likes to be set apart. It likes to look down its node at the rest of humanity. Such isolation is actually damaging. It is like the reverse of the Midas touch turning everything golden into a problem. Let us say we have fear — as all humans do — the ego would have having "artistic fear" which sounds like a specialized something that perhaps only an expert, and an expenseive expert at that, could help us cope with. If we have plain old ordinary fear, then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it — pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. It is only by courting humility that we stand a chance as artists. We we choose to join the human condition rather than set ourselves apart from it, we begin at one to experience relief.

Each of is unique and irreplaceable. There is only one of us all of time. We are on this earth, partnered always by unseen forces that would guide us and guard us as we journey into the unknown. No one else can take our journey for us. Two people setting off side by side will still encounter different sights, different wonders. The openness to being is all the openness we are required to have each day. We start today, and tomorrow we start again, and the day after we start again, as we will the day after that. In this way, and no other, does our journey come to us. We begin. The rest unfolds through us.

Who says (besides our Inner Perfectionist, who is always doing sit-ups) that we have to feel calm and centered to write out a piece of music? Maybe we can feel and be a wreck and do it anyway. Maybe we can do it and do it wrong and fix it later. Maybe we do not have to be or perform perfectly. Maybe we are allowed to have a learning curve. Maybe part of what we need to learn is a little compassion.

For an artist, "I don't know" is the hard time. It is the season between seasons when you are not sure what you are making and if you are making anything worthwhile. All artists go through seasons of rooted joy and seasons of rootless restlessness and doubt. It goes with the territory. If we knew, always, what it is we know, there would be no new land to push forward to. We would do and redo what it is we do — and that is not the artist's life. Ours is a life of invention.

We are the Universe. We are made of it and it is made of us. If it is intelligent, we are intelligent. If it is wise and all-knowing, so are we. If it knows what is best for us, we too know what is best. These is no separation between God and us, God and matter. It is all consciousness. We are all consciousness. We are God dreaming God. We are God making God. We are creators co-creating the Universe. If we can trust the Universe, then we can trust ourselves. Even better, if we can trust ourselves, then we can trust the Universe.

If you think of the universe as a vast electrical sea in which you are immersed and from which you are formed, opening to your creativity changes you from something bobbing in that sea to a more fully functioning, moire conscious, more cooperative part of the ecosystem.

Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question "What will they think of me once they know this?" This is a frightening question, particularly if we have ever been made to feel ashamed for our curiosities and explorations — social, sexual, spiritual. The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, "See?"

As artists, we have a different kind of accountability than many people. What pays us and pays off in the long run is really the caliber of our work. As artists, we have an inner Geiger counter and it ticks loud and clear when we are near pay dirt — first-rate, high-caliber ore that means we are working at the top of our form. Because this device is an inner one, it isn't easily fooled by the prestige of a certain venue or the lack of another. What it detects is quality. It knows the real thing when it is near it. This is what "accountability" is for an artist, the blunt assessment: Is it any good? It boils down to the simple fact that artists respect good art — and we respect ourselves when we make it.

If you ask an artist how he got where he is, he will not describe breaking in but instead will talk of a series of luck breaks. "A thousand unseen helping hands," Joseph Campbell calls these breaks. I call them synchronicity. It is my contention that you can count on them. Take a small step in the direction of a dream and watch the synchronous doors flying open. Seeing, after all, is believing. And if you see the results of your experiments, you will not need to believe me. "Leap, and the net will appear."

Writing is best broken down into a one-day-at-a-time, one-page-at-a-time process. We do not need the courage to write a whole novel. We need the courage only to write on the novel today. We do not need the courage to finish and publish a novel all in one fell swoop. All we need is the courage to do the next right thing. Today's pages may yield tomorrow's editing job and next month's design job, but just for today all we need to do is write.

If we will use writing to connect to ourselves, I believe we can connect across time and space and distance. I believe in the global village we are making, and I believe that in ordcer to make that village truly habitable, we will need to return to that page. We use the expression "I am paging him" when we speak of trying to get someone's attention to some busy intersection — a convention, an international airport, a large manufacturing concern. Our world, our global village, is all of these things, and if we want to get one another's attention, we do need to "page," in a slightly different sense that we need to write.

As artists, we run a risk of staleness if we close ourselves off to fresh experience. Each day must remain an exploratory expedition. We remain tourists on our home terrain. We must hold on to a sense of adventure. To do this, we must keep our curiosity alive and gently feed it. Walking, the world moves toward us at a manageable rate. We are able to take in the new flowers at the greengrocer's, the fresh plantings in a window box. We see our world anew.

God is present everywhere. The act of making art is a direct path to contact with God, and we do not need to travel any geographic or psychic distance to experience the grace of creation in the grace of our own creating. Goethe told us, "Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it." This was no mere bromide. It was a report on spiritual experience — an experience that each of us can have whenever we surrender to being a beginner, whenever we dismantle our adult's aloof avoidance and actively seek the Great Creator's hand by reaching out our own to start anew.