The adults surrounding me were dutiful, conscientious people whose life force was devoted to fulfilling society’s expectations, which, at that time, were very clear. Man, breadwinner. Woman, housewife. Children, clean, obedient, and unheard. No questions asked.

Within that tribal construct, Heart’s Desires were what lured the lazy and the naïve into NeverNever Land and turned them into starving artists and drug addicts. If you wanted to survive in “the real world,” you didn’t dream. You didn’t ask yourself what you really wanted. You just got on with it.

While the Revolution Road scenario holds less sway now, it and other tribal configurations that offer clear-cut, unassailable rules and beliefs to live by, still hold many of us captive, to varying degrees. The abyss unmasked by the endemic breakdown of social structures, can make any externally imposed certainty seem preferable to the hard inner work of thinking and feeling for ourselves, releasing what no longer serves us, discovering what can never be destroyed, and allowing The Eternal – I would also call it Love – to shape our lives.

But many of us have made our choice to take on that work – or we’re being inwardly urged to do so. “The real world” of duty and adherence to the unexamined egocentric/ethnocentric/anthropocentric assumptions that are destroying our planet and us along with it continues as a parallel reality that we may occasionally inhabit and/or get dragged into kicking and screaming, but it no longer hooks us – or not for long. We are on a common exodus from me to we, the Logos of the Heart is our road map, and our Heart’s Desires are the beacons along the path.

Within this context, Heart’s Desires are those things within each of us that open up the boundaries of our world. They release us from self-centredness. They expand our sense of joy, wonder, and possibility.

Take a few moments and consider this question: What enchants me and expands my world?

I wasn’t feeling particularly enchanted or expansive when I first got up this morning, and so I lit a candle, wrote the above question in my journal, took a deep breath and wrote the following: “singing; swimming in a river, lake or ocean; traveling on a boat or small ferry; cooking something new for someone; reading and listening to poetry; speaking the truth and being heard, and vice versa; looking at beautiful art and antiques; prayer; silence; exchanging ideas with someone about subjects that matter to both of us…” Some of these things are going onto today’s “to do” list. And now, having opened up that channel, many more things are occurring to me. All it took was a few minutes of my attention

“Whatever your heart desires” is not an irresponsible indulgence but a deeply responsible covenant to Self and to the other beings, human and nonhuman, seen and unseen, with whom we are co-creating our evolving world.

“We are compassionately challenged in this life to hold many contradictions in our minds at once and to dream those impossible dreams. What appears silly at the outset may turn out to be deeply meaningful, and what we are advised and conditioned to take seriously often turns out to be… Silly!”

Jean Houston

To complicate things further, I have a Beatnik within who will not be denied. Not the cartoony beatnik that says, “Daddyo” and can’t string a coherent sentence together because he’s so stoned, but The Beatnik brilliantly characterized by Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in words that still stir my soul:

“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way – a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners on Times Square and in The Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America – beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.”

“…unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire’s reliable old joke: ‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.”

If I had been a bred-in-the-bone Beatnik instead of being born to parents who were fresh out of the army, maybe I would have a better shot at attaining what Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap, describes as “a prospective mind” – a mind that is never surprised by surprise, a mind with the capacity to respond nimbly to possibilities, a mind that allows us to see the world, not as machines, but as a series of complex systems. According to Homer-Dixon, a person with a prospective mind is comfortable with mess, whereas a person who is focused on efficiency and getting rid of waste is anti-creative.

Penelope Green, author of “Saying Yes to Mess,” agrees with him, saying, “Studies are piling up that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds.”

That should be good news for me, given the state of my desk at the moment, but The Neatnik, who loves order, harmony, and beauty, is distressed by the unruly heaps of uncategorized papers, the unsorted in-basket, the notes I can’t find, the projects I won’t be getting to any time soon. Don’t order, harmony, and beauty have a place in The Creative Universe?

Yes! After a tortured lifetime of monkey in the middle between Inspired Beatnik and Nerdy Neatnik, I came across the following words by Eric Maisel in Coaching the Artist Within: “When a person opts for the fully creative life…one of the most important things she must do is refuse to take sides with dualities like process and product, simplicity and complexity, discipline and flexibility, and so on…Then she can become a holistic creator, someone who has learned not to arbitrarily and defensively exclude options.”

Eureka! The wisdom of embracing opposites and honoring their respective roles in the creative process applies equally to the duality, order and messiness. I don’t have to choose one over the other! This messy phase I’ve been in has contributed to a fruitful and exciting time of imagining new possibilities for the book I’m working on, for generating new ways I can serve my clients as a contract writer, and for developing my new business as a creativity coach. When I bring order to my workspace (tomorrow, I promise!), I will be better able to follow through on those ideas and make them a reality. I will have inadvertently followed the advice of Beat poet, Gregory Corso: “If you have a choice of two things and can’t decide, take both.”

The essential lesson that I’m discovering – especially now that I’m reflecting more deeply on the creative process as a fledgling creativity coach – is the need for mindfulness and fluidity in our creative pursuits. Rather than being slaves to a habitual approach or way of being, we can choose what will serve us best in the moment. Yesterday when I was hurrying home with my groceries, I got an idea for my book. The Neatnik urged me to get home and note it in its rightful place in the appropriate computer file, which never works because the idea will have evaporated (I’ve listened often enough to The Neatnik to know), but The Beatnik urged me to stop, find a place to sit, put down the groceries, borrow a napkin and a pencil from strangers and, in the words of Jack Kerouac, “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.” I listened to The Beatnik, wrote down the idea, and then went home and heeded The Neatnik’s command to copy it into my computer file before the napkin gets lost in the laundry.

Maybe it wasn’t a mistake in shipping. Maybe the task of transcending this duality was Divinely inspired.

“Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth are met together. And righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.” (General Lorens Lowenhelm from the film, Babette’s Feast)

I know that dog. That dog is the writer within who’s supposed to be devoting the first hour of every day to a memoir/exploration about my spiritual community experience in the the 1990s. (It’s my main commitment in my 28 Days of Creative Recovery. For more on that, ask me to send you my May 2010 newsletter – donaleen@donaleensaul.com.) I’ve suited up and shown up most days, I’m proud to say, but the first day I sat down to write, the writer within refused to move.

Determined to keep my commitment to The Muse, I decided I would write about my doubts, usually the ringleader in any case of writer’s block.

“Something about this project feels old, dark, dank…like re-entering a stale, airless room that is better left to rot. Plus I’m buried in doubt, wondering if it’s just self-indulgence, hanging on to old grievances, wallowing in the past… A masochistic way of punishing myself – interminably. I’ve bumped into all of those elements in the back rooms of my mind, and there is a definite danger that any one of them could run the show. They’d like nothing better. Or maybe it’s a futile attempt to bring legitimacy to an experience that I should have moved on from long before now. Or maybe it’s a book that I ought to have written eons ago and it’s way too late now.”

No wonder the writer within was lying prone, declining all overtures.

But the thing is that writing about all of the doubt unleashed something. It wasn’t in my head anymore, preventing the brain synapses from firing. It was on the page.

Next I decided to fantasize about abandoning the project altogether.

“So what do I do? Light a big bonfire on Ambleside Beach, and with all of the nice West Van families with their dogs and baby strollers and matching Lulu Lemon outfits bearing witness, dance naked as all of the notes and journals and yearning and wondering that have engulfed this project crumble and melt and reduce themselves to ashes? And then giddily walk away cleansed and renewed, ready to reincarnate as a children’s author, provided the police whose station is just two blocks from the beach don’t haul me away first? It’s be easier than trying to write this thing.”

That was fun. As it turned out, I went past my hour and got some writing done on the project that day. The same thing happened every day thereafter.

The most important outcome from unleashing my doubt and desire to quit is that I reconnected with my determination to complete this book. Not because anyone is interested in it necessarily, nor because the publishers are clamouring, not for any reason other than it will gladden my soul.

Should you feel blocked in a project, try giving voice to the doubt, resistance, loathing, despair, ambition, fear, whatever feelings might be in the way of your creative flow. And if you don’t know what the feelings are, even posing questions like “What is stopping me from writing today?” or “What is blocking this project?” can take you off the sidewalk and onto the creative freeway.

This phrase from the Bob Dylan song (from his 1997 album, Time Out of Mind) has been on my mind from the moment I woke up this morning. It took me until noon to figure out why. Five years ago today, my brother Steve had been goin’ down the road feelin’ bad. Five years ago today, he drove his well-worn red truck into a gravel pit on the outskirts of Kindersley, Saskatchewan, Canada, and took his life.

Bob Dylan was his hero in life. Bob Dylan’s music is Steve’s emissary in death.

In 2008, I launched Did You Know I Would Miss You? – A Healing Journey, a memoir/guidebook about mending the heart after losing a loved one to suicide. (I’ll be giving a talk about it at Banyen Books in Vancouver on May 13 6:30-8:00 PM.) Having felt pretty light ever since, I have assumed that I no longer needed to walk the healing path.

It didn’t take much to bring on the tears today. Just a CBC Radio story featuring Clarence Asham, a 56-year-old blind man with an IQ of 32, a musical savant, master accordion player, and the subject of several documentaries. He had been separated from his older brother, Hal, when Clarence was taken from his family and sent to an institution at age 6. The brothers were reunited as adults and Hal, a volunteer at the Carnegie Centre, a vibrant gathering place at the centre of Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside, asked Clarence if he would give a concert there. Everyone was moved by a performance that, in the words of a woman in the audience, “reminded us that every human being is valuable.” As a footnote to the story, the producer said that shortly after his concert, Clarence’s proud, once-estranged brother, Hal, passed away peacefully.

I burst into sobs. Anything that reveals the mysterious, enduring tenderness of the human heart has been reducing me to tears lately. It’s about Love. In a world where the judging, worried, fearful, gossiping, nagging, deceitful, merciless sorcerer of an ego tells us that our bank balance, career, or squabble with our neighbour are what matters, the lessons of Love need endless repeating.

There is no greater teacher of Love than death. Especially death by suicide, which tears us to shreds and abandons us at the threshold of the Heart, our only sanctuary. When my brother died, I vowed that I would bear witness to his death and to his journey thereafter. I didn’t realize that this vow was lifelong, but of course it is. His suicide was a painful act with profound reverberations. The Earth still weeps for my brother. There was only one Steve.

I can never deny Steve’s death or the pain of losing him, when it arises. I walk a healing path, where there is no escaping Life’s sorrows or Love’s lessons, and where every human life matters. My brother is not here in body, but my love for him and his for me has never left and never will. That is the gift of Steve’s life. It is the gift of Steve’s death.

(I wrote the above piece this time last year. For some reason, I didn’t publish it. As this May’s anniversary of Steve’s death approaches, and my heart feels heavier, I take comfort in my own words. For more stories and wisdom about the loss of a sibling, go to this wonderful website, The Sibling Connection.)

“I have a ‘should’ about moving forward with my creative work today. I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything today except read, eat, stare out the window, make some phone calls. I don’t want to market my writing services, I don’t want to work on my book on deconstructing spiritual communities. I don’t want to move forward on my plan to make May a month of creative celebration. I do not feel inspired – at all. I feel absolutely unmotivated. I can see kitesurfers from my living room window. Perfect wind conditions. Gorgeous sunny day. It must be heavenly out there in that rollicking indigo ocean. Did they have to drag themselves out of bed, force themselves onto the highway in their Acura MDX with board strapped to the roof, fight their way into their slightly damp and clingy wet suit? Not likely. In the mood I’m in today, I would have rolled over.”

I know this state well enough to recognize it as the creative doldrums, a transitional state that happens after a time of intense busyness and focus. Once the big project is done, then what? The adrenalin is still high from the big push and with nowhere to apply it, panic sets in and the mind goes into overdrive. What if I never work again? What if I’ve got writer’s block? What if I should have gone to library school? One idiotic thought follows another.

I took three deep breaths. Then I took seven more. With sanity returning, I watched the kitesurfers soaring and looping and sailing through the air. Like them, I let go of everything – the to do list, the expectations, the shoulds – everything except the experience of being alive. Like them, I allowed myself to be carried beyond my fear. Like them, I opened up an ocean of possibility.

After a day or so of no obligations and absolute freedom to do whatever brought me joy, I was getting up with the seagulls to work on my book for a couple of hours before the beginning of my work day, I was planning my May of creative celebration. I was riding the wave.

Last evening, I worked up the courage to attend a Singles event. It had been recommended to me by a discerning friend who had also been single for many years, but who had recently met a wonderful man with whom she was falling in love. They had both been referred to this event. I took it as a sign.

The write-up on the website described it as an evening for adults over 40 “looking to share their gifts with a significant other” or “with a spiritual calling to find harmony and balance in their relationships.” The quote by Rumi – “Your Task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” – resonated with how I have tried to live my life and to deal with my confusion, emotional clamour and cynicism in the realm of love, and so I was looking forward to meeting others with a similar intention.

Having managed to find an attractive, age-appropriate yet playful outfit, make room for the confusion, emotional clamour and cynicism within, and be open to what the evening had to offer, I felt pretty relaxed as I drove for 45 minutes through the last remnants of rush hour traffic, crossed a couple of bridges, and found my way there. Doublechecking the address, I saw that yes, it was indeed the Unity Church, which I tried not to be put off by. I have nothing against the church or its adherents, some of whom are dear friends, but I confess to having judgments about it being spiritually vague, precious, New Agey, and female-dominated. What guy is going to want to come here? But I told myself to set my prejudices and raging cynicism aside and just be open and curious. I walked in the door. It was eerily quiet…like a church. A serene space with beautiful artwork on the walls, but not a lot of laughter and no male voices. A sweet young woman, well beneath the 40+ age limit for whom the event was intended, collected my $35 and gave me a self-sticking name tag.

I walked into the room and saw about 12 people, all women except for one man, sitting in a circle. One of the hosts, an attractive woman in her 50s or 60s, saw me and said, heartily, “Don’t be shy. Come and sit down.” (In that moment, the clamour of emotions didn’t include “shy.”) I filled a paper plate with salad and some pieces of sandwich, and joined the circle. The host made a comment about how the men would come in droves if they saw a picture of “all of you beautiful women here.” I look around. There weren’t too many happy faces. The lone man assured us in his nasal reedy voice, “I could take you all on!” perhaps intending to be humourous and ironic and inject some much-needed male energy.

As I choked down my spinach salad and bits of smoked salmon wrap, I tried to tune in to the conversation. The hosts, who never introduced themselves, knew some of the people – it seemed as though some (including the man) may have been therapy clients – and they were talking about things and events comprehensible only to those in the facilitators’ immediate circle. Neither of the hosts asked my name or made any attempt to include me or anyone else whom they didn’t already know. I tried to contribute something to the conversation but it was ignored. Mary, the woman sitting next to me, a Celtic storyteller, tried to interject the odd droll comment, but was also ignored. I felt like asking if she wanted to escape and go for a beer (I don’t even drink beer) but the second facilitator, who seemed stern, but was perhaps just uncomfortable that this “singles event” was such a bust, was sitting next to her.

It was 7:30, I was almost finished my salad, and was wondering how I was going to make it to 10:00. I felt as thought I was trapped at a bad dinner party to whom I had been invited by a man with whom I was in a relationship that I knew perfectly well was doomed. I went to the washroom, acknowledged to myself the obvious – I wasn’t having any fun and didn’t like the people (except for Mary) – and made an executive decision to leave, even though it would be absolutely obvious to all, and even though the pleaser within was aghast. The sweet young woman well under 40, who had collected my $35, smiled and asked me if I had had a good time. I mumbled an obvious lie about a family crisis, asked her to make my apologies to the group, and left.

I’m still puzzling over this statement on the facilitators’ handout given out that night: “Our aim is to answer the need of communication of friendship facing adult singles today.” Huh? The good news is that I didn’t stay, thereby vaulting over what I have discovered over a lifetime of experimentation to be a significant barrier to love – trying to please people who could care less. I think Rumi would have approved. Too bad he’s been dead for 736 years and probably not available.

Writing is soul work, not a mechanical process reducible to “how to’s.” It’s like making love. Knowing the mechanics of what bit goes where will not make one a better lover. The same is true of writing. It is the soul connection that is the source of our unique writer’s voice, and that is what our readers/listeners respond to. (It’s what our lover responds to as well!)

Writing is at essence an act of courage. Sometimes dark and difficult stories emerge from pen or keyboard. People are scared of pain and we live in a society that marginalizes it, but embracing our own difficult stories and attending to others’ is the source of our power and our humanity – both as writers and as people. Such stories are part of the human experience and they are universal.

We live in a wounded civilization and we inhabit a wounded planet. In the West, we are sheltered from a lot of that, but it doesn’t serve us as writers or as people to perpetuate that pattern. A large part of the writer’s role in our society is to shed light into the dark places. Sometimes we do that with humour; sometimes we do that with pathos. But whatever our means of sharing what’s true, we need to know our inner landscape to write with any real heart or authority.

Of course it doesn’t. What sane person wants to drag his or her sorry bag of bones out from under the flannel sheets at 5 AM to write a blog that no one is going to read. Well, besides you.

Well, me. Why? Good question. I don’t know why. Nobody’s going to care. Except me.

I’ve been corresponding with my writer friend, PJ Reece, the only person on the planet I envy. A financially independent expat writer living in a charming flat in Mazatland who, when he isn’t taking salsa lessons, lounging on the beach, or listening to live jazz at the nearby plazuela, is ” just trying to finish a fucking novel, which grows in size the more I work on it. It’s out of control, my dramatic thrust has vanished, a red flag that always indicates a problem at the beginning…I must sit back in astonishment at how I’ve manifested this sometimes shabby, occasionally chic, but actually very normal paradise.”

Doncha hate him? He’s also a fine writer, and I’m not just saying that because I’ve known him for 40 years (we were both in utero of course). Check out his blog and find out for yourself. You will be one of the few, as he admitted in a recent letter: “Are you reading my blog? Don’t worry. No one else is either. But here we go…that shouldn’t bother us.”

He’s right. It shouldn’t. Three days a week I get up at 5 AM to work on my upcoming book, “Where Mystics Walk.” It’s my covenant to myself. Will anyone read it? Dunno. I’ve got a bulging inbox full of projects for hire, but writing my February newsletter as well as this blog, neither of which pay, had to come first this morning. Like most wonderful things in life, writing as if no one is reading is not a rational act. It’s far more glorious than that. It’s an act of faith.

So get writing. No  one will care. But that shouldn’t bother you.

“Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” Don Marquis

So how do we deal with this loss that knows no bounds? From a loss that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is comparable to surviving a concentration camp? Recognize that it’s bigger than our will or our egotistical insistence that we’re immune or have transcended it. Acknowledge it, breathe into it, and see it as a reminder of our humanity. Suffering is part of the human experience, at least for most of us. When we try to deny that, or gloss over it, we separate ourselves from our loved ones who are still living, and from other wounded humans. At the heart of our suffering is our love. Something we have never lost and never will. Let’s send love to that inconsolable part of us and to all others who have suffered loss by suicide or by some other means. Let’s send love to our brothers and sisters who couldn’t bare the pain and took their lives. Let’s share the love that also knows no bounds.

Somehow you have to come up with an article, essay, story, blog, novel, screenplay or whatever — and you wonder how the heck you’re ever going to get past that mean little flickering cursor and come up with something intelligible, never mind brilliant. You’re not the only one who feels this way. Maybe it’s an undeclared dread of The Other, The Great Unknown, The Abode of the Damned that leaves so many of us avoiding our writing project du jour — or worse, eternally distracted by endless emailing (which I am convinced is a disguised hell realm).

I’ve been writing for a living for-ev-er and I still struggle with cursor-phobia. The famous Gene Fowler quote — “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — is not hyperbole. It’s my life.

At my choir‘s recent dress rehearsal for our Christmas concerts, our director, Gail Suderman, pointed out that we were looking like deer caught in the headlights in our collective dread of our three performances this coming weekend. “Here’s the deal,” she told us, “When you’re singing, all you have to keep in mind is your next phrase, and then your next will follow. Keeping your focus on each breath, on each phrase, will carry you beautifully through all three performances.” Hearing this, we all relaxed — and we sounded one heck of a lot better as well.

One phrase at a time. It’s comparable to what the great meditation teacher, Stephen Levine, author of A Gradual Awakening, refers to as “just this much.” It applies to singing, to writing, to all creative undertakings — pretty well everything, in fact. We don’t have to upload the whole thing in one go.

And so the next time you boldly suit up for your writing session, just take it one breath, one word, one phrase at a time. Each phrase will lead to the next, which will lead to the next, and before you know it, you’ll be done!