A Hair Of The Genius That Bit Him

Howl's Amateurish Moving Castle

Again in Medium, we read about writing by Ben Dolnick.
https://medium.com/@bendolnickbooks/i-amateur-1c21293b27eb

and come across a wee nip of the creature-genius that inhabits each of us, but needs to be coaxed out with a bit of cake or effort:

...While I was writing my song, I wasn’t worrying about whether I was a songwriter, or whether what I was doing was any good, or whether songwriting, as an art-form, had seen its best days come and go. My mind was too busy with a series of logistical puzzles: How could this part be made to fit with that one? What would happen if I took this chord and flipped it on its head? Could this line be made better? Amateurism, for once, seemed not a specter to be feared but a gift to be treasured. And it’s a gift I intend to smuggle back with me into the realm of fiction-writing.

“A writer,” Donald Barthelme said, “is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”

This line, which had always struck me as terrifying, a Beckettian howl of wind across a wasted landscape, looked now, in the wake of my attempt at songwriting, like a curious kind of reassurance, even an inspiration. The fear, the self-doubt, the befuddlement: Yes, exactly! You’re on the right track! In novel-writing, no less than in songwriting, the freedom from strictures need not merely be a problem: it can also be the point. A license that was never truly granted can, after all, never truly be revoked.

Seen this way, how lucky I am, really, to spend each day participating in the never-ending apprenticeship that is writing. How silly to imagine that an endeavor as mysterious as creation — whether of a song or a novel — could, or should, ever be approached routinely. We see the pit, we nod hello to it — and we take a step.

I rush to point out that this holds true with most of our human endeavors, including that of experiences of the Holy.

If you cling to dogma, you will experience dogma. But if you take the leap into the unknown - the quest into the desert, the night journey, the ascent of Sinai, the concourse with the suffering of the world - you will nod hello to Holy.

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Inspired

While my cup of coffee was brewing this morning, I was at Huffington Post reading some TED links. There was a fellow, Keith Barry, who was a magician and had some twaddle about the power of "brain magic". It was all pretty awe-inspiring and fascinating, but it was just a magic show, after all; a great one, true, a magnificent show, but it was a show, and I thought that of all the people who read and listened to TED, and if just .05% of us got up from our chairs and went and did some volunteer work with the sick and needy, then I guess I might believe in this "brain magic".

As far as I can tell, Tony Robbins is getting bulkier and toothier. He was lurking on the side panels. However, even though I was watching TED, I am not crazy enough to watch Tony Robbins.

I wonder if there is still a wave of interest in that visualization nonsense about visualizing success or what not... it was in some goofy book a couple of years ago. I think it was The Secret, and it was about some "Law" of Attraction, and how to change one's life for the better.
I think even Oprah endorsed it at one time, leading me to think that maybe this was the real item.

I think stuff like The Secret is like slavery:  it creates strong chains that bind you to images from the ego.
If all your images are good, that's great. If all your imagery and attractions have to do with thinking about 50$ bills floating around your bed in the morning, then it is probably not so good.

*Create Whatever You Want and Desire
*Attract or Maintain a Great Relationship
*Attract More Money into Your Life
*Attract or Maintain Great Health and Well-being

So, I switched gears... and pages... and began to read about a mother who used to hurry her daughters along...
She was a Type-A personality...
(Don't you just love understanding reality with profound concepts like "Type-A Personality"? It adds so much to one's life!)

Anyway, I was inspired.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-macy-stafford/the-day-i-stopped-saying-hurry-up_b_3624798.html?utm_hp_ref=parents&ir=Parents

... When my daughter and I took walks or went to the store, I allowed her to set the pace. And when she stopped to admire something, I would push thoughts of my agenda out of my head and simply observe her. I witnessed expressions on her face that I'd never seen before. I studied dimples on her hands and the way her eyes crinkled up when she smiled. I saw the way other people responded to her stopping to take time to talk to them. I saw the way she spotted the interesting bugs and pretty flowers. She was a Noticer, and I quickly learned that The Noticers of the world are rare and beautiful gifts. That's when I finally realized she was a gift to my frenzied soul...

What precious gifts God has given us, and which we often ignore.

I have always suspicioned that it was not eating forbidden fruit that got Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, rather it was a self-involved ignorance of the beauties surrounding them.
I think perhaps they thought too much about the endless committee meetings for Creature-Naming... a job which took up a lot of time, no doubt. Just naming all the eukaryotic bacteria alone would take up years of their time. And then there was all that husbandry of the domestic staff of animals, seeing that the bovines had enough grass to eat and other homey chores.

In our endless quest for overcoming ourselves, we tend to lose sight of the great gifts of Life, which happen by some unkind fate to be Not-Us.

For we do one of two things:

(1) we aggrandize ourselves and needs, which leads to crap like The Secret, which is a poltergeist alchemy of desires,

or

(2) we minimize ourselves, and see us as something to be overcome, which denies our very nature as creatures of God.
 
Yet in the things which stand apart - like children, children who are human just like we are, yet are apart from us and are Independent Entities!  It is such things that are those golden reflections in a golden eye, beauty within and without.... all is beauty...

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