“Let’s face it, you’ve never amounted to anything and never will.”
“Your creative dreams come A BIT LATE, don’t you think?”
“You’re too OLD and worn-out to make any money now. Scraping by on an inadequate Old Age Pension is all you can hope for.”

It doesn’t matter how often I’ve had these nocturnal visitations, there’s no getting used to them. Like an infant left alone in a stroller in the middle of a traffic jam – I am always caught off-guard and undefended.

I’m sure that many of you have “been there.” The messages may differ, depending on your age, circumstances and personal history, but the basic theme of self-judgment is a common one, particularly in the west.

Of course the evil emissaries of doom and failure don’t just appear at night. Their carping can carry on throughout the day – especially if you’re taking some risks in your life, whether it’s building a business, taking a new direction in your creative field, or sharing your wisdom in a book.

“What makes you think you can make any money at that?”
“You’ll never be as good as (FILL IN THE BLANK).”
“There are already way too many books out there.”

Allowing negative messages like these to hold sway can kill our dreams, keep us playing it “safe,” and stop us from sharing our gifts. Finding ways to deal with them skillfully ought to be our biggest priority.

The most important thing to recognize is that, regardless of their content, every single one of these messages is wrong and irrelevant. They don’t come from the larger Self who wants to be of joyful service to this world, but from a diminished, fearful version of ourselves who wants to protect us from veering from the beaten path, even if the beaten path is harming us. No matter what the demons are saying, no matter how convincing they may sound, they’re wrong.

Below are some suggested techniques for routing the night-time demons. The day-time naysayers are equally nasty and there are a number of techniques for trouncing them, but for now I will focus on those that strike us when we’re at our most vulnerable. The intent is to settle you down as quickly as possible so that you can get the sleep you need to function happily, productively, and creatively the next day.

• Calm your body. Relax your forehead, your breathing, and your movements. Deliberately change position slowly as opposed to tossing and turning. Focus on your breathing and, if you wish, inwardly count your out-breaths. Sometimes it helps to tell yourself that if you’re still awake after 100 outbreaths, you’re to get up and start your day. I’ve never gotten to 100 yet.

• Invent a sanctuary for yourself. Envisage yourself surrounded by benign presences comforting you and attending to your every need. Maybe you’re lying on a comfortable bed next to billowing white muslin curtains, breathing in fresh sea air. Know that you are safe.

• Listen to a recording of poetry, meditative music, or a talk by one of the many spiritual teachers of our day. Pema Chodren and Stephen Levine are particular favourites of mine.

• If the negative messages are particularly virulent, get up, light a candle, grab your journal, and do a written dialogue with a source of inner wisdom or healing that’s meaningful to you. Allow this being to give you love and wise counsel.

It’s best not to attempt to engage the demons of the dark with counter-arguments. Even if that weren’t futile, it just engages the mind and makes it even more difficult to get back to sleep. Assuming the role of a wise guardian or parent enables us to detach from the stories, to cease identifying with them, and to take command of the situation.

Maybe the nocturnal emissaries of doom have a purpose beyond tormenting us in the wee hours. As a veteran of countless night-time encounters, I have found that I am better able to deal with the negative stories that encroach upon my mind and upon those of my clients during the day. Perhaps the demons of the dark are not our enemies after all, but merely sparring partners to strengthen us so that we can become more effective creators and happier humans by day.

Now there’s an empowering bed-time story.
(a shorter version of this blog first appeared in the Creativity Coaching Association’s April newsletter.)

I first encountered Eric’s work eight years ago when I was looking for resources to develop a course on Creativity that I was teaching at the Vancouver Film School. Eric’s The Creativity Book was a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration. In more recent years, I picked up Fearless Creating, which formed the basis for my course, “Stoking Your Creative Fire,” which I will soon be offering as a teleclass. Eric is also the originator of the exciting 21st century profession, creativity coaching. I’ve taken two of his courses, which are predictably brilliant, and am close to completing my certification through the Creativity Coaching Association.

My blog is one stop in a tour in which Eric is promoting his new book, Rethinking Depression. It challenges the prevailing perception of depression as a disorder that needs to be fixed and medicated away, and instead offers a perspective and step-by-step approach that encourages us to make meaning rather than monitor moods. I’ve struggled with depression at different points in my life – what human worth his or her salt hasn’t? – and I am delighted to see this intelligent, kind and practical book arrive on the scene.

The following Q&A will give you some deeper insight into Rethinking Depression:

The first section of your book focuses on debunking depression as a “mental illness,” which is not to say that sadness and unhappiness cannot be debilitating. Can you briefly describe the main thrust of your argument?

What I hope to demonstrate is that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we name and treat certain human phenomena. When we call something a “mental disease” or a “mental disorder” we imply a great deal about its origins, its treatment, its intractability, and its locus of control. The mental health industry has its reasons for calling life’s challenges “disorders,” but we have few good reasons to collude with them. I ask that readers who do feel depressed seek help. I hope that this books aids people in understanding what help to ask for from professionals and what help we should realize they can’t possibly offer us.

If there is “mental disorder of depression,” why are millions of people convinced that “depression” exists?

As soon as you employ the interesting linguistic tactic of calling every unwanted aspect of life abnormal, you are on the road to pathologizing everyday life. By making every unwanted experience a piece of pathology, it becomes possible to knit together disorders that have the look but not the reality of medical illness. This is what has happened in our “medicalize everything” culture. In fact, the word depression has virtually replaced unhappiness in our internal vocabularies. We feel sad but we call ourselves depressed. Having unconsciously made this linguistic switch, when we look for help we naturally turn to a “depression expert.” We look to a pill, a therapist, a social worker, or a pastoral counselor – even if we’re sad because we’re having trouble paying the bills, because our career is not taking off, or because our relationship is on the skids. That is, even if our sadness is rooted in our circumstances, social forces cause us to name that sadness “depression” and to look for “help with our depression.” People have been trained to call their sadness “depression” by the many forces acting upon them, from the mental health industry to mass culture to advertising.

Why is recognizing the role of unhappiness in our lives an important feature of “rethinking depression?”

To acknowledge the reality of unhappiness is not to assert the centrality of unhappiness. In fact, it is just the opposite. By taking the common human experience of unhappiness out of the shadows and acknowledging its existence, we begin to reduce its power. At first it is nothing but painful to say, “I am profoundly unhappy.” The words cut to the quick. They seem to come with a life sentence and allow no room for anything sweet or hopeful. But the gloom can lift. It may lift of its own accord–or it may lift because you have a strong existential program in place whereby you pay more attention to your intentions than to your mood. One decision that an existentially aware person makes is to focus on making meaning rather than on monitoring moods.

What does your Existential Program offer people who are hoping to shed the mental illness label of depression?

I ask that people take as much control as possible of their thoughts, their attitudes, their moods, their behaviours, and their very orientation toward life and turn their innate freedom into a virtue and a blessing. Even if people decide to take antidepressants or engage in psychotherapy to get help with their unhappiness, they will still have to find ways of dealing with their meaning needs, the shadows of their personality, their consciousness of mortality, and the facts of existence. This book offers guidance in all of those areas.

Rethinking Depression is a fantastic resource. Do check it out.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

The deeper truth surfaced today in a short dialogue with my Muse, a.k.a. The Creative Consuela.

D:     I’ve committed myself to writing a blog today – tomorrow at the latest – and I feel totally stuck. I don’t have a clue what to write about.

CC:  That’s because you don’t want to write the damned blog.

(insert potent “I’ve been busted” pause)

D:    (blurting) OK, OK! I don’t! I don’t want to do anything productive at the moment!

CC:  So don’t.

D:    But I want to!

CC:  You’re making me crazy.

D:    Wait! Wait! Don’t go! I’m pretty sure it’s resistance, not a lack of desire.

CC:  Bingo. There’s your topic.

I felt elated. I could write a book about resistance – if I weren’t so resistant to doing so.

First of all, how do you know if you’re resistant to an activity or task? What if it’s the right thing to do or what if you’ve outgrown it or what if it simply bores you silly?

Inquire within. Ask yourself, honestly, “Do I REALLY want to do this?” If a task is truly loathsome and life-denying, you will feel zero energy for it. A root canal would be preferable. But if is something that feeds your soul, you will feel a glimmer of excitement, a hint of discomfort, a frisson of fear… Well, more likely a blinding, paralyzing, crushing commotion of fear. There’s your answer. You do want to do it but you are most definitely resistant.

Resistance surfaces whenever we set out to do something that challenges our status quo, takes us out of our comfort zone, or as the master resistance warrior, Steve Pressfield, author of The War of Art, says, “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.”

So what am I resistant to besides blogging? Writing my e-book, singing, teaching, building my creativity coaching practice, playing the piano, meditating, exercising, traveling, dating, making my vision boards, planning my business, increasing my income… Sadly, this is just the beginning. And these are all things that I love to do, that would truly benefit me, and that would make my sould sing.

What are you resistant to? Telling the truth about it is a major resistance buster. Resistance thrives on lies, excuses, and bullshit of every variety. The truth withers resistance.

But only temporarily. Make no mistake. Resistance is a recurring phenomenon, a vicious, unscrupulous adversary that won’t take its knee off your throat for long. Eric Maisel, my creativity coaching teacher (who, by the way, is my guest blogger this coming Saturday, April 15. Inviting him forced me to start up my blog again) encounters it in most of his clients. Here’s how he describes a hard-fought breakthrough with a client in his book, Coaching the Artist Within:

“Why, though, did I have to go at her with a hammer and chisel to get her to do the most obvious things? What causes resistance so fierce that even a jackhammer can’t dent it?”

Good question. But don’t seduce yourself into trying to find the answer. Resistance delights in seeing us flail about trying to figure out why we’re resistant. It chortles at our attempts to understand it or ourselves. Don’t waste the time that we’re all running out of.

Instead, make a list of things that you’re resistant to doing. Pick one of them and take one small step toward doing it. Tell yourself that you only need to do it for five minutes if that’s what it takes.

I’m happy to be back in the blogosphere and to have prevailed over my resistance – today. If I prevail over my resistance in the weeks to come, I’ll soon be offering some classes, coaching packages, e-books and numerous other goodies.

Stay tuned for subsequent blogs with additional tips on how to deal with resistance.

And keep me posted on your battles with resistance.

We can do this.

Another worthy target for your love is you, and as The Creative Consuela’s chief envoy, I can assure you that one of the most au fait acts of self-love is honoring your creativity. Here are a couple of questions to either write about or ponder as you contend with the many deliveries of real or metaphorical roses and chocolates that will be laid at your doorstep today:

My creativity has been a blessing because…

Creative gifts that I’ve been given include…

The creative gift that has most defined me is…

I put my creativity at the center of my life when I…

Another way to love your creative self is to sign up for creativity coaching. Get some help discovering next steps, solving creative quandaries, vanquishing resistance – or whatever your creative heart desires. If you contact me at donaleen@donaleensaul.com by midnight PST on Wednesday, February 16, you will get The Creative Consuela’s package of three 45-minute sessions for a special Valentine’s Day price of $200 instead of $225. Such a gift to your richly deserving self.

And if you live in the general vicinity of Vancouver, BC, CANADA, treat yourself to the next series of six Wednesday evening classes, Stoking Your Creative Fire, which begins on Wednesday, March 16 (7-9 PM). A fabulous opportunity to honor your creative dreams and to make them a reality. As my Valentine’s Day gift to you, if you sign up yourself and a friend at donaleen@donaleensaul.com by Midnight PST on Wednesday, February 16, the two of you can attend all six classes for the price of one ($180).

Contact me at donaleen@donaleensaul.com and take advantage of these irresistible offerings.

And in the meantime, let’s keep spreading the love. We need it now more than ever.

I love you!

Donaleen

In the past, I would have let the idea disappear into Neverneverland in order to attend to habitual homecoming tasks like unpacking, watering the plants, and checking the 487 emails, most of them spam, that had accumulated in my absence. But not this time. This time, I walked in the door, put down my bags, dropped my coat, headed straight for my laptop, and yes, gentle readers, I started writing the play. I worked on it for about an hour – long enough to get a decent start on it but not so long as to completely freak out my inner neatnik, who is used to running the show.

I’ve been continuing with the play ever since. I have every intention of finishing it, showing it around, marketing it, and seeing it performed on stage. As one of my creativity coaching clients, a wise woman of 80, said to me recently, “If not now, when?” Picasso puts it even more pointedly, “Only put off tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

On my 2011 Brush Dance calendar, I noted that the month of January is International Creativity Month. In honor of this grand occasion, here are twelve things that you can do to harness creativity’s revitalizing, transformative power.

1. Make a bucket list of the creative projects that you would like to complete and post it somewhere prominent.

2. Mess with the warden of your Comfort Zone. Change working hours, get to work or go home in a different way, take another route to do your errands, listen to a new radio station, read a magazine or book you wouldn’t typically read, go to a cafe you wouldn’t normally go to, vary what you eat for breakfast, follow someone on Twitter whose worldview is antithetical to yours, etc.

3. As I did when I started my play, act on your creative impulses. Stop whatever you’re doing – especially if it’s something potentially draining and mind-numbing like watching a reality show, surfing the web, gossiping, whining or complaining – and spend 10, 15, 30 minutes on a creative project.

4. Remind yourself that recognizing our creative capacities and those of our children may save us from destroying ourselves and taking our planet with us, by giving a few minutes of your time to Sir Kenneth Robinson.

5. Go for a walk on your own. As Raymond Inmon famously said, “If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.” I can personally verify that Angels whisper to solitary female walkers as well. (By the way, if anyone knows who Raymond Inmon is, let me know – his quote appears to be more famous than he is.)

6. Do absolutely nothing for 10, 15, 30 minutes. Lie down, listen to music, and close your eyes. The best ideas come when the mind is relaxed. (Keep a notebook handy.)

7. Get offended. Watch the politically incorrect, brilliantly nimble-minded, creatively unbound, dangerously funny contemporary mystic, Billy Connolly, who has rightly declared, “There are people who need to be offended on a regular basis, I’ve always felt, and I’m the very boy to do it.”

8. If you have a problem, state it in reverse. If the statement is positive, make it negative. If it is negative, make it positive. For example, if you want to improve a relationship, list all the ways to make it worse. If you want a story to be less shallow, consider all the ways to make it more so. If you want to remedy a bad situation, make a list of all the ways the situation could be interpreted positively.

9. Take a poem, painting, short story, photograph, dramatic monologue, etc. that you love and create a tribute piece in which you emulate the artist’s style. Conscious imitation will enrich your own work and your unique slant will naturally emerge. Originality is an inherent outcome of sincere creative pursuit.

10. Recall and celebrate your moments of poor judgment. Picasso has said, “The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” Such moments may inspire your next creative work. Great works of art don’t tend to be about people behaving sensibly.

11. Book a coaching session with The Creative Consuela to help you define your creative goals and overcome the barriers to carrying them out. Email donaleen@donaleensaul.com.

12. Enroll in my upcoming six-week “Stoking Your Creative Fire” workshop that starts at 7 PM on Wednesday, January 26. The $180 fee includes a 30-minute creativity coaching telephone session with The Creative Consuela.

Remained attuned to subsequent blogs as I offer more suggestions for making our creativity matter.

“When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.” Madeleine L’Engle

Traditionally this is a time when we make resolutions for the coming year – to get fit, get out of debt, quit smoking, finish the manuscript, learn Spanish, etc. Such resolutions have a notoriously poor success rate – 10% according to one source. (That’s probably a generous estimate.) And yet year after year, many of us keep making them, hoping that this time the outcome will be different. But as Einstein has said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.”

Maybe it’s not a fatal character flaw that prevents us from keeping these promises to ourselves. The calendar is after all a human creation, not a natural one. Maybe Jose Arguelles, author of the international bestseller, The Mayan Factor, is right when he says, “It is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit.”

What if we were to attune to the darkness of this time of year instead? What if we were to heed these words of the essayist, Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams: “real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it”? What if we were to follow the example of David Whyte, as expressed in his poem, The Willingness to Rest:

In my tiredness
and willingness to rest
I slipped so far down

I felt the earth
embraced me
and knew me once again.

Perhaps instead of soldiering on and doggedly resolving to better ourselves in the coming year, we need to allow our emerging self to meet us in the sweet darkness of these winter days and nights, and to whisper its secrets.

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter
(from “Dreams” by Mary Oliver)

As this year ends and the new year dawns, hold this question in your heart: “What is my dream?” Maybe you have several of them. Allow them to emerge out of the bounds of time. Take note of them as they occur to you.

Pay attention to your dreams on these long winter nights. They have more potency now than at other times of the year. Write them down if you can.

And in the coming days, when you have some moments alone, you may want to try this Eric Maisel exercise that I adapted from his book, Fearless Creating:

Light a candle and sit quietly. Have paper and pen and/or a musical instrument close at hand.

Attend to your breathing without trying to change it. When your mind starts its inevitable ranting, gently tell it to “Hush” as you would a restless child. As the thoughts keep recurring, keep hushing them. The intent is to descend to the place of no thought. This may take time. Be patient.

When you’re as quiet as you can be, gently say, “Deeper” and wait. As you feel your breathing deepen, go silently into the darkness. Be as still as you can be.

Pay attention to what comes to you – images, words, gestures, melodies… Gently hold these messages until they begin to come into focus.

When you feel ready, write, draw, play, or dance these images, words, phrases in whatever way feels natural to you.

Be patient with yourself. The silence may not come at all. You might not get a single idea – this time. It’s not about doing it right. The effort alone is a balm for the soul.

In the coming year, beginning on January 26, I am offering a series of Wednesday evening workshops, “Stoking Your Creative Fire,” to support the kind of creativity that gives your life significance, richness, and intentionality. It is for artists or would-be artists of every description who wish to create more authentically, more frequently, more deeply. Or for anyone who wants to live with greater, passion, and joy. Be prepared to encounter your deepest yearnings and to discover practical ways to make them a reality. Discover how you might have sabotaged your creative intentions in the past, and learn tools and approaches to advance them instead.

For those of you living in the Vancouver area or close by, “Stoking Your Creative Fire” could be your chance to give form to those dreams that beckon to you in these dark winter days and nights.

For information, email me at info@donaleensaul.com.

“Each person has access to a rich creative world that demands expression. Without it, life becomes a single note longing for its melody.”
Jean Houston

Especially since we live in a culture that fights the darkness. Our cities, where most of us live, are always lit up. When I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s impossible to determine the time without checking the clock.

We even medicate away mild depressions. Some psychiatrists and mental health professionals regard a few weeks of sadness, hopelessness, and disinterest in life as symptomatic of clinical depression. We are expected to be eternally cheerful. Nothing against cheerfulness – I’m pretty cheerful myself – and nothing against medications that ensure a quality of life that might otherwise be impossible for those who suffer from serious mental illness. But I can’t help but feel that we deny ourselves important spiritual and creative nourishment when we succumb to “find your happy place” messages and when we value the bright lights of confidence and certainty to the exclusion of the shadow states of doubt, confusion, and vulnerability.

Last week, I attended a candlelight ceremony put on by The Compassionate Friends, for parents whose children had died – whether by illness, accident, or any other means. The purpose of the ceremony was to ease the hearts of those who have suffered from this terrible loss – at Christmastime, when being in a happy perfect family is all but mandatory. Siblings are also invited to attend and so I lit a candle for my brother, Steve, who died by suicide six years ago, and for my twin sisters, Joan and Joyce, who died shortly after their premature birth a year after me, because the hospital in which they were born lacked incubators. It was humbling to be in the company of these brave parents, witnessing them share their tears from having lost what had been most precious to them. Lighting their candles to affirm their love, their courage, and their faith.

I woke up the next day in a dark despairing place, but I took courage from those parents and lit a candle, took out my journal, and wrote about how I was feeling. At such times, I often dialogue with a source of Inner Wisdom; this time the voice invited me to take a number of deep breaths and “let the darkness embrace you. Don’t fight against it.” I did that and I felt better. Not great, but better. Embracing the darkness helped me to see the source of the feelings, to unearth some irrational self-judgment, and to replace it with thoughts grounded in reality.

After that, I began working on my book and found that I was stuck – unable to write a single word. A scary state for a writer, but rather than give up, turn on the radio, and move on to a project for a client, I heeded the message of Inner Wisdom once again: “Just breathe, and light another candle. If you don’t write another word for the remaining hour, that’s alright. Just let go. If something comes to you, write it down.”

I did just that. After a few minutes of breathing into the silence, I had a realization that not only served my book but also addressed the state I had woken up with, in which I had felt alone in my discouragement: “There is no separation between the light and the dark. They are one and the same. Lighting a candle is an affirmation of that lack of separation.”

After that I was able to write and felt that deep resonance with darkness that, in a strange way, feels like home, as suggested by Theodore Roethke in his poem, In A Dark Time:

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood”

Perhaps this can be a helpful message in this time of the solstice when the darkness is most with us.

Cathy Sosnowsky’s Snapshots inspires, supports, exemplifies, sustains, and celebrates the mysterious relationship between grief and creativity.

As she describes so beautifully, we’re helpless in the face of our grief. She writes about Ian, their minister, arriving the night of her son Alex’s sudden death falling from the roof of a tennis court at age 17: “He sat between Woldy and me on Alex’s bed, holding us each by a hand. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating, expressing what each of us felt, but were now too numb to utter.” In its simple humanity and in its expression of our utter defenselessness before death, especially the sudden death of a child, this scene says it all. As the shock wears off, Cathy describe feeling such profound grief that she didn’t want to survive it. She didn’t want to live.

Excruciating though it must have been, in acknowledging these feelings, Cathy did herself a favor. Sorrow may hurt like hell, but disregarding it annihilates us. We may be able to function and appear to be getting on with our lives – but a large part of us is absent. I often quote Stephen Levine who, in Unattended Sorrow says that ignoring our grief, “inhibits intuition. We come to trust ourselves less. We cannot ‘feel’ the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as ‘a bit unplugged’… This quality of grief can slow our creativity and ‘dumb us down’ a bit.”

Cathy didn’t allow herself to be dumbed down by grief and, because of her courage, which I can only describe as breathtaking, creativity came calling. It showed up as a kind of wise, nonjudgmental, reliable companion through those dark early days: “Writing out my grief gave me some sense of owning it. I felt less the helpless victim. Even when I was writing about my darkest thoughts (I wrote suicidal poems–I wanted to be with Alex in death), the expression of them gave some relief.”

The psychotherapist, Alexander Kennedy, who wrote The Infinite Thread: Healing Relationships Beyond Loss, a book about sustaining a relationship with a loved one who has died, says, “People who are grieving find that they have little energy or enthusiasm for external reality: their energy is drawn inward. And as grief dampens their outer senses, it can open inner senses, giving them new acuity in seeing, hearing, and feeling what is inaccessible to our senses during normal times.”

Cathy tells us about this mystery: “All of a sudden, everything had significance and demanded that it be shaped into a poem.” Grief revealed itself to be more than an eternally patient shoulder to cry on — it was her Muse. Here’s an excerpt from her poem, “Lament”

“One dark night in December,
death and poetry
entered our house,
shaping my lips forever
in a song of lament.

I could not cry alone,
had to shout my sorrow
hear it right through the aisles
of canned tomatoes, boxes of rice
frozen burritos–Alex’s favourite.”

As Cathy says in the book, she wrote 140 poems in her first year of grieving – and continued writing poetry daily for most of the second…and much of the third, fourth, and fifth years… “If a day went by without producing a poem, I would slump into an even deeper depression.”

I heard about an essay, Life Begins Today by Jacques Lusseyran, who had been in the Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald, during World War II. One of the things he did was organize poetry readings for fellow inmates. Picture a group of starving, freezing, uprooted, terrified human beings on the edge of death huddling in a washroom reciting poetry to one another. It diminished their suffering. It helped them remember what was worth living for. As Lusseyran said, “To nourish the desire to live, to make it burn; only that counted… You couldn’t let yourself forget that it is always the soul that dies first–even its departure isn’t perceived–and that the soul brings the body down with its fall. It was the soul that had to be nourished, first.”

Instinctively Cathy knew that, and she describes how, at Poet Olga Broumas‘ Hollyhock workshop, “Poetry: Transcribing the Soul,” which she attended when he started to get serious about her poetry, she not only deepened her artistry but also discovered how much she had to live for. This is the last verse of a poem she wrote about love and about Woldy:

“love carries on
bearing our dead son within and between us
listening for his song
seeing the chip in his front tooth
scar over his right eye
callous on thumb

love doesn’t let go”

The subtext of Cathy’s trials through grief was her conception and ultimate delivery as an artist. Her final words in Snapshots are powerful: “My dead child gave birth to a new mother.” Cathy the artist, the poet, the writer was one dimension of this new mother. With the publication of Holding On – Poems for Alex, Cathy’s private grief became a public benediction. Through the crucible of her suffering, Cathy was able to forge an authentic path for other bereaved people, especially bereaved parents. She was able to articulate their grief in a way that made them feel less alone, but she did more than that, she gave it grace, dignity, and a kind of terrible beauty. I found this short poem, “Grief and Dreams,” in her Holding On collection:

“let me tell you about grief:

a bathtub full of stinging nettle
a deep dark hole
a chasm

but the hole is full of rats
no sweet oblivion

only regret    rage
self-pity

oh let us bathe in stinging nettle!
the pain will be distracting

those surface itches
better than the hole

where despair waits
a ravenous rat

to feed upon
our sweetest dreams”

I asked Cathy recently if it had ever been her dream as a child to be a published author but she said no. In fact, in Snapshots, she says” “Since Holding On was published, I’ve read from it at many poetry readings. Early on, I often felt that I was somehow betraying my grief, betraying my love for my son. Maybe my Scottish mother’s unspoken criticism (“Who do you think you are?”) was still operative, on some level, in my brain. Was I showing off? Only the heartfelt thanks I received from many bereaved parents kept me going”… and as she says a bit later, “Everywhere I went, I took Alex with me. I couldn’t write, or teach, without him.”

Alex is here with us today – I have no doubt about it – and he would be so proud of his gifted “new mother” and of what she has created in this courageous, honest, beautifully written page-turner of a book.

Can anything be more fundamental than this simple piece of wisdom? There is nothing less fun than not having fun.

By fun, I don’t necessarily mean going through life with a lampshade on one’s head, but with a sense of joy, of feeling connected to ourselves and others, of being content with what is. Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, says it well:

“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”

Living by the “No not having fun” dictum requires discipline and creativity because life is not a continual amusement. Its challenges, many of which originate in the mausoleum of the mind, can be real killjoys.

But as the 19th century philosopher, mystic, and psychologist, William James, observed, the mind can also be fun’s number one event planner: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can change his life by changing his attitude of mind.”

One of the biggest gifts I ever gave myself is to attend a 10-day Vipassana meditation boot camp in which I explored the mayhem of my mind. According to the teacher, S.N. Goenka: “Practice of Vipassana reveals that mental action precedes every physical and vocal action, determining whether that action will be wholesome or unwholesome. Mind matters most.”

On the final day of the course, we were all glowing with joy. Not because our lives were perfect. Most of us were there because we were in some kind of crisis, and we were all on our way back to deal with it. As we were waiting for the bus, one of the women said to me with shining eyes, “Life sucks so you may as well be happy.”

Fun is way more possible if we don’t make it contingent on things being perfect or even passable. Pema gets the last word on this: “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

And fun. Have yourself some fun today.

Then I remembered that Abdul died. Taken away without warning by a heart attack at age 64. Abdul, the patron saint of used car owners as I used to call him, had kept each of my ancient cars on the road for the past 20 years – Harriet the Honda, Tallulah the Toyota, Tina the Toyota… “Only two cars,” Abdul would often say, “Honda or Toyota.” The only two makes worth having. He was barely five feet tall and his motor was always running. He never overcharged me, he never made me feel stupid for being mechanically dyslexic, and he never let me down. He was savvy, efficient, and sharp as a tack. A shy, humble man of few words who ended conversations before they had barely begun, his good heart resounded like a temple bell and still does. His heart tolled his love and pride for his family, his gratitude for and pride in his home, his caring for me and his other clients. His heart tolled so loudly that his bereaved family has been besieged by visitors and well-wishers, and my mother who’d never met him, upon hearing of his death, felt as though she’d lost him too.

Such losses must be honoured. Luckily, my instincts to do the simple, life-giving things like make chicken soup, fertilize my orchid, light a candle and call Abdul’s son, Shahreem, and speak about the gift of his father’s life, spoke loudest yesterday. When we take the time to mourn, we pay homage to the living as well as to the dead.

My favourite spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, says that grief is “an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent. We don’t know what to do with our pain, and we never have. We have been told to bury our feelings, to keep a stiff upper lip, to ‘get over it and get on with our lives’ as though loss were not an inevitable part of life.”

According to Levine, disregarding our sorrow “inhibits intuition. We come to trust ourselves less. We cannot ‘feel’ the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as ‘a bit unplugged.’…This quality of grief can slow our creativity and ‘dumb us down’ a bit.”

Our creativity demands that we pay tribute to our grief. It is no accident that great loss often gives birth – or new life – to the artist within. In my book, Did You Know I Would Miss You?, written after my brother, Steve, died by suicide in 2004, I speak of how acknowledging our unattended sorrows can free up our life force and our capacity to create. If you sense unattended sorrows clouding your heart and blocking your creativity, you might want to try this exercise:

Reflect on your own unmourned losses, using some or all of the following:

I have never acknowledged the loss of…

I had forgotten the loss of…

I can begin to heal the loss of…

And in the meantime, may you be inspired by the Abduls of this world. May the temple bell of your heart and of your creativity toll loud and long.