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Whenever there is inspiration, which translates as “in spirit,” and enthusiasm, which means “in God,” there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.

That’s a quote I’ve often repeated to people from the German author and teacher Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 28 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Acceptance and Change, but today I want to get into talking about inspiration and rituals. 

So what exactly is inspiration and how are we supposed to get inspired? Well, first perhaps we need to look at the word itself, inspiration, like Tolle did in that quote I read at the beginning. To get more academic first. Here’s what The Oxford English Dictionary says of the noun inspiration is:

the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative; the quality of being inspired, especially when evident in something; a person or thing that inspires; a sudden brilliant, creative, or timely idea; the divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible; the drawing in of breath; inhalation; an act of breathing in; an inhalation.

So whatever we that noun meant, there’s probably a few more things we need to understand about it. Literally, from the Latin, inspiration means “to breathe into” from the verb inspirare.

So, breath is life and the creative life comes through inspiration. Carl Jung writes about this in his autobiography when he remembers carving wood in the 1920s. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

Only while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu – ‘the breath of life.’ It was a further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream, which was now revealed as the ‘breath of life,’ the creative impulse.

The artist, the creator breathes in the inspiration. The “breath of life” then goes into a wood carving, musical instrument or invention or onto the page or canvas. From a biblical sense you could say God breathed life into the world, into worlds.

This kind of talk about inspiration makes some writers and artists I’ve met want to thump their head off a wall. A lot of the time they see inspiration as anything but a magical process, calling it only part or even irrelevant to the creative process. As William Faulkner once said:

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.

You can go online and find countless writers, articles and creative people commenting in much the same vein, saying that the creative process is almost mechanical, like a mechanic greasing your car (E.B. White) or an engineer thinking about an engineering problem (Doris Lessing).

So, yes, getting to that inspired point is work. But if it is then that means we can all get there, no? Or couldn’t it be both at the same time, work as well as allowing inspiration or “spirit” to come into us?

Stendhal says something along the same lines:

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.

Of course this is easier said than done. The mental walls of procrastination enjoy waiting instead of working.

American writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how frustrating this process can be. Instead of using the word inspiration though, she replaces it with “genius”:

… my creative process is — I’m not the pipeline! I’m a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?

So, to get inspired we need to make time, find space, be consistent, and have the intention to find inspiration by working. Only then does inspiration come, when we’re not expecting it, but in a timeframe when we’ve decided to work. Also, if we put in the work it will come to us when we aren’t working, when walking as I talked about for Nietsche and others, or daydreaming, or doing yoga. But if we haven’t opened ourselves to the work daily, or consistently then those flashes of inspiration can’t come as often when we’re not in front of the canvas, or computer or blank page.

So,  why do we not talk about inspiration more? A physicist who came to La Muse – again to anyone coming to the podcast on this episode, that’s the retreat myself and my wife Kerry ran for nearly twenty years in the south of France. Anyway, one summer this physicist told me people don’t talk about inspiration because we’ve become so bogged down in science, not what he called ‘the spirit of science’. He went on to say how all the great physicists and scientists he knew about were some of the most inspired creators, but that science took ownership of them when they were dead, forgetting the imaginative leaps they’d had to take to arrive at new creations. I still remember him smiling and saying we should all be as inspired as Einstein and quote “live life as if everything is a miracle.” 

The miraculous is suspicious to the academic, the scientist, but whether they trust in it or not, inspiration exists, like quarks. And like a quark, every time you look at it, it disappears. You can be an agnostic, an atheist, an evangelist, but the thing to understand — inspiration exists. From my experience, and the experiences of the majority of the creators I’ve met, that ineffable flow is there, and the last thing you want to do is analyze it. It’s there, it’s beautiful, and it serves a purpose.

The problem arises when people start to try to quantify it. It’s never quantifiable. That’s why when you ask creators how they came up with what they created they kind of look at you and say, “Well, it just went there”, or “That’s what seemed right”, or “That’s where it fit”. They’ll tell you a part of where it came from, what event or moment inspired it, where they came up with it, but not exactly where it came from. This is why a lot of creators are resistant to even the word inspiration, like Faulkner earlier, as they don’t like to question their process, where their inspiration comes from. They get uncomfortable. A lot of the time they think it’ll take away the magic, the mystery of the process, jinx their creative flow.

Where did the painting, idea, song, line, invention, business idea come from? There’s no answer that seems compatible with everyone accept that it comes from somewhere, that little voice, that lightbulb moment. You never know where it’s coming from, accept that it comes from within you, and not by thinking about it, but by being “in the zone”, or meditating on it. Then it appears. 

So, what’s your word for inspiration? The unconscious, the numinous, “thinking”, meditating, contemplating? Countless creators have been inspired by the Muses, God, the Unconscious, Mother Earth. The noun doesn’t matter. What matters is that we know what it is. The word I use to describe it is inspiration. To you it could be Mind, a Higher Power, the Universe, quantum mechanics, unicorns. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s yours. 

For Blake it was the “holy spirt” — again that word spirit. As he put it: 

I myself do nothing. The holy spirt accomplishes all through me.

For Brahms, the word was God. Oscar Wilde looked to the stars: 

We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The spiritual, the ineffable, in contemporary society has been co-opted, like the word “creativity”, which I talked about in earlier episodes. It’s been co-opted by part-time yogis, meditation experts and motivational coaches, to mention a few. They talk about spirit and spirituality as something special, precious, unattainable. To me, real spirit and spirituality is found in inspiration. We have to reclaim this word of spirit, inspiration, because when someone says to me “I was inspired to…” invent, write, build, cook, crochet, then I know I’m listening to something deeper than thoughts, deeper than emotions. I’m listening to someone who’s inspired, and I love being around inspired people. They make me want to create even more. They energize me with their inspiration, literally and figuratively.

I could be walking in the woods when a chapter idea comes to me, or cooking for my family when I realize what a character is supposed to do. It’s a joyful experience, as if a weight gets lifted, a sigh of relief inside. Oftentimes I’ll actually take a deep breath and sigh, and smile. Then I grab a notebook before it disappears. 

It can also just come in the most bizarre ways. I talked about the wonderful Stephane Hessel in one of my first episodes, Why Create and What is a Creator? when talking about how important it is to create. I want to repeat again today, that quote of his:

To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

 I was in resistance to inspiration when it came to writing. After being told the story of my good friend’s father, his concentration camp experiences, uncles in the resistance and much more I told her that’d make a wonderful story. She looked at me and said I should write it. I resisted. Said I’d stopped writing. Then I got home that evening after driving for hours and found Hessel’s Time For Outrage in our mailbox. I had completely forgotten about it, thinking it was lost in the post, as I’d ordered it months before. Another story about a Jewish survivor and that quote again, talking about resistance and creation. I was resisting. So I gave in and start writing the story that eventually became a novel inspired by both their lives. 

As soon as you want inspiration it will not come. It can’t be forced. You do the work, follow your process and rituals and it will come. To open to inspiration, we have to train our minds to shut up, to encourage our emotions to remember, and open our in-sides to the love of doing what we need to do. 

We have to get out of our minds (thoughts) to get to the heart (emotions) of what it is we love (inspiration) to create. This is not a want, it’s a need. A want is the mind again. A need is what we love. 

Spirit’s the suggestive voice, far quieter than thoughts, and even more powerful than emotions. Indeed, as Tolle said at the beginning, this is what inspiration means: “in spirito”, in spirit, when the spirit or soul speaks from inside you. It doesn’t talk to us inside our head. It comes from a deeper, quieter place on the in-side of us which we “hear” in our head.

Usually like this: “It just came into my head,” or “It suddenly hit me that…,” or “It was like it came out of a dream,” or “It came to me out of the blue,” or “It suddenly dawned on me.”

Great creators open the door into what they “hear”, into their spirit, through their creations. Simply think of van Gogh, Tolstoy, any of the Buddhist poets and artists, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, the list goes on and on. They all speak of spirit, write of it, try to paint it.

So, we don’t know where inspiration comes from, but there’s nothing like reading back over something you’ve written to wonder: “Where the hell did that come from?” “Did I write that?” That’s when you know you were inspired.

Another thing: inspiration is not all of creation. It’s a starting point. It can connect great pieces of work. Help close them. When I talked about the description of the dancer ‘lost’ in the dance in episode 17 – The Dancer and the Dance and Doing What you Love – I was trying to capture that passionate, disconnected, out-of-the-world mental state of being when one, a creator, is caught up in the creative process, a rising in some creators to something close to the religiously ecstatic, like the Whirling Dervishes in dance. Those are the magical moments in the act of creation – unforgettable when they happen, like being struck by lightning. But this could only be the prefatory shape, the beginnings. When the imaginative fire cools and the coldness of thought has to reassess, question where this creation is going, how to clarify it, make it whole. As an Australian friend reminded recently by quoting Yeats’ gravestone epitaph:  

Cast a cold Eye 

On Life, on Death.

Horseman pass by.

Or another analogy he used, the small locked gate of C S Lewis which leads through the Wall into the garden of the Rose, the Imagination. 

Mozart, in one of his letters, talked about this kind of fire when talking about growth and inspiration. He wrote about when his “soul is on fire with inspiration”. You mightn’t form the whole thing in your head at once like Mozart, but the idea of the fire of inspiration being something that grows inside is very important. Like a garden, you plant the seed, and the plant eventually flowers as it’s nourished. It just takes time to blossom, from inside. And the best way to nurture our inspiration? Through rituals.

No. You don’t need to sacrifice an animal. But maybe you need to sacrifice something. You do need to have non-negotiable things, which means you need to have rituals, routines.

Of course, routine is not exciting. It’s repetitive, and repetition breeds frustration. It’s boring. But if you want inspiration to appear, you have to appear first. To be able to be bored. You can’t just expect to get inspired. So, the second question to ask after understanding your word for inspiration is what is your creative routine?

If you don’t have one then you need to create one. It means being predictable. Get yourself into your office, your studio, your shed at the same time, or for the same amount of time, or on the same day, consistently. 

For example, some composers get into composing by starting with a Bach piece. Some writers start transposing notebooks into the computer. Others start where they left off the day before: Hemingway, Steinbeck. Hemingway also stood and wrote, then got his stuff typed out. Again this is another habit or ritual to get him into his daily work. Thomas Edison, before he went to bed every night had the ritual of asking advice from his subconscious, the question he was trying to answer that day, before he went to sleep. Why? Because he’d have his answer the following morning.

Engage the esoteric. Switch from your left to right brain by lighting a candle, or repeating a mantra. Have a literal invocation, as Homer did to the Muses. Rituals and routines work. They allow inspiration to show up, to flow, and afterwards to make sense and art, a creation, out of inspiration.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a German author, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb.  Literally, this one means: 

An empty sack does not stand.

Ní sheasaíonn sac folamh

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

That’s a quote from Albert Einstein’s book The World As I See It.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 27 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Acceptance and Change, but today I want to get into talking about emotions, feelings and emotional memory. 

Emotions exist inside my body. I feel them coming up inside of me. We all know this, but are we aware of how emotional a creation we don’t even think about can make us on a daily basis.

An example. There was an old woman in our village in France. She was ninety-three at the time. Anyway, one winter morning we were talking about the lavoir in our village. A lavoir is a stone shed with a slate roof and a stream going through it in a village, where she and the other women of the village used to have to wash their clothes. She told me how the washing machine was a “benediction” when it appeared. Her face lit up when she talked about it, sighing. The thing about it that though is she never knew Alva J. Fisher, the man from Chicago who invented it. But I’m sure she would have kissed him. With tears in her eyes she told me how the washing machine changed life for women like her. She no longer had to haul her dirty washing to the “lavoir” where the women knelt in snow and sun to hand scrub their clothes clean. She described how she used to have to break the ice in winter to clean her clothes. To her, many decades later, this man Fisher’s creation was a very emotional thing, a miracle. So, when we create, we have to remember that when we put something out into the world that we will not always know the kind of emotional effects it’s having on other people. This is a good thing to remember the next time you’re frustrated with a lack of recognition for what you do. In that moment somebody could be experiencing positive emotions because of what you created without you ever knowing it. 

So, it’s important to understand this idea: that when we create we give emotional resonance to what we create. We affect people out in the world emotionally, a lot of the time without ever having met them. 

I think that’s pretty beautiful.

But even before that there’s our own emotional perspective. Because when you get a feeling or feelings about something, inside you, and these feelings evolve into an emotion, which combined with action and inspiration then we make a new creation. 

Emotions can be the enemy too though. If you allow them to be. P.D. James once said that all fiction is largely autobiographical and that much autobiography is fiction. Creative material can come from your own life, the facts, the observations, suffering you feel and see around you. Tennessee Williams makes this even clearer, saying what we create should be “emotionally autobiographical.” It’s the feeling of what we’ve experienced which is important, not the exact visual memory of it, which should inspire us. 

When I look at a van Gogh, a Picasso, I feel something. When I went to see Michelangelo’s “David”, I felt something. I wasn’t simply looking at a piece of art, I was experiencing it. Why is that? Because the creator infused feeling into their work. I don’t like Picasso’s work, it makes me feel uncomfortable. That’s just me. Other people love him. The point though: he makes you feel something. Again, how is that?

There’s a cliché in art and writing that goes something like this: “No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading.” Substitute the word “writing” with any creative act. “No tears in the painting, no tears in the looking/seeing” — what happened when I went to see/feel those artworks I mentioned above, for the first time. There’s an emotional resonance in the work, what creators mean when they say they “put themselves into the work”.

It can take years to create something, but the dedication eventually pays off if we stick with it. The emotion comes when someone’s life is effected by using your cure, by enjoying your building, by using your machine, by loving your words. People who create life-saving cures, sustainable architecture, evolving technology, books draw from almost the same emotional recall. They remember a family member or friend who died from an illness, a house that was unlivable, washing clothes in a stream, having no access to books. This inspires them to create a solution. Which then benefits others.

I’m not saying you have to go into these emotional memories and relive them all the time, but what I am saying is they’re useful when trying to understand what it is that inspires you to create. By relaxing, meditating on these emotional memories, we can feel what part of life inspires us, and whatever inspires us nearly always helps us to create.

I never completely understood this until I went away on a retreat to write a novel. I was walking on the beach to clear myself out after writing all morning, when it suddenly came to me that one of the characters was going to die. The realization made me stop. I looked out to sea, and without realizing it at first, tears started to roll down my face. No, I thought, she can’t die, how sad. It was then that I realized, I’m crying. This is what I mean by emotional memory. I had put myself in the place of the character so much, that when she was about to die, it was as if it was someone I really knew was dying. 

The Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski used this in his work, or “system”, with actors when they worked to create roles. He called it “affective memory”. This became more famous when further developed by Lee Strasberg, with Method acting. They both believed actors needed to bring their personality, their emotions, to the stage when creating characters. Creators can use this in their work by using what Strasberg called “emotional recall” or “sense memory”. 

For example, what were your physical sensations during emotional events in your life? You can use these to infuse into characters in plays or novels, or document in non-fiction, or to inspire you to change things, to create things that solve problems, like the man who created the washing machine. Maybe it was his mother kneeling down in the winter to crack the ice to wash the clothes that inspired him later on to create the washing machine? Who knows? But a lot of the time this is the cause, the inspiration, to be of service to others, to help create something that helps us to suffer less in some way.

You don’t have to get lost in the emotions, simply recall the events so you can understand your characters, your story, your subject in a painting, the thing you need to create, from sadness, frustration, anger or love, compassion and joy.  Creators do this every day when they create. Empathy can be drawn upon, to be drawn.

I quoted Ray Bradbury when I was talking about education in episode 6 and I want to quote him again now when he said, “If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” And to add to this Renoir, the painter, not his son the filmmaker when he said: “Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.” So great art comes from emotion, from feeling, something ineffable, but there because we feel it, and that’s why we look at an amazing painting, as Renoir once said, because it makes you want to walk into it, because it makes you feel so much.

Towards the end of his life Tolstoy wrote his text What is Art? where he famously got into ripping into Shakespeare and while he was at it, Beethoven too, when he was going on about “good art”. He gets into the same thing I’ve been talking about, at base, empathy, not just some confection to enjoyed, more an important fundamental of life, of living. Without it we lose one of the most important forms of communication. In chapter five of his What is Art? He dives into feeling

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others… And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

And then later on in chapter 15 he has this to say:

The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s – as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist – not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

We enter into a world where the creator infects the viewer, the reader, the creative. It’s this infectiousness that enters into us when we witness a great work of art, why we want to walk into the canvas as Renoir put it. And Tolstoy is against many understandings of what art’s activity is. Union. He prefers to call it a union among humans. They’re joined together by the same feelings. And this communion is fundamental helping us all evolve in a healthy way.  It’s a way of connecting back to the past, to past lives, worlds, cultures, so that it’s a kind immortal connection, or sharing. He says we transmit all we’ve experienced but also all we’ve felt from others down the millenia. As he says back in chapter 5:

Thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts…

Tolstoy talks about three conditions of infectiousness in art but in the end it’s the last one he talked about, sincerity, as the most important feeling to feel when trying to express oneself in art. He says vanity or covetousness is why “upper class-art” has no power. Because it lacks this feeling of sincerity. Quality, he says, comes from sincerity, no matter what the subject matter.

So, if we’re to listen to people like Tolstoy, or Bradbury, or Renoir, then we have to go inside, to where sincerity rests, to shed, like an onion, the outer skin, the facade, to go further in with each layer, and observe the tears come with the release whether standing on a beach with a character, or in front of an easel with a paintbrush.

We have to let the words, the lines, the sounds transpose our emotional experience into something. Is it visual, audible? Words are not important. It’s the feelings you feel as you write, draw, sing. What are the feelings inside you? Transport them onto the page, the chords you’re plucking, the dance you’re dancing. It could be a doodle, a few words. What matters is that you put it down, to communicate how you’re feeling. This is where catharsis comes in, you release the feeling, the emotions, repressed or on the surface, into your creation. The drama, and the drama of our own lives and others effects the body, cleansing it of emotions which can lead to a feeling of renewal, restoration. The Greek word katharsis actually means “purification” or “cleansing” or “clarification”. 

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a scientist, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb.  Literally, this one means: 

The people encounter one another, but the hills never meet (nor the mountains).

Castar na daoine ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na cnoic ná na sléibhte

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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What worked for you on Tuesday will work on Thursday, a claim that cannot always be made when what you hold in your hand is a paintbrush or a camera or a pen. What was exactly right for your last painting will be completely wrong for this one. Creative people love to claim they know what works, but in reality all they know is what worked. Fortunes are lost and hearts broken in that shift of tense.

That’s a quote from the essay “Getting Good” by the American novelist Richard Russo’s book The Destiny Thief.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 26 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Awareness, Sacredness and Distractions, but today I want to talk about Acceptance and Change.  And this one will not be as long as recent ones either because there’s a simplicity and a humility that I want to get at today, because I’m not sure these two things of Acceptance and Change are addressed very often in reference to the Imagination, not because they’re so ineffable as say what I talked about in the last episode, awareness, but because they’re so blatant, so in front of us all the time, every day, that often it’s hard to see what’s right in front of us, much like the elephant in the room, where we can see parts of changes in our lives, the trunk one time, the legs another, the tail another, but never enough humility to understand, to see the whole animal, the animal as a whole, to see change as a whole and the necessary presence, or need of the presence of acceptance in our lives to deal with change, and to transition from change into acceptance and from there transition into creativity.

Years ago there was an established poet at La Muse. For any of you coming to this podcast for the first time La Muse is a writers and artists retreat I co-founded with my wife in the south of France almost twenty years ago. Anyway, I was talking to this established poet and another writer about setting up a creative writing program in Ireland, because at the time there were none and I thought that should be encourage to change. I suggested approaching universities or colleges not associated with the arts, as they would probably be more receptive to do something new. The writer became excited about the idea. Seeing his excitement, I said I would be happy to help, such as giving a lecture on retreats, the people I’ve met, maybe something about how to create. 

He got very enthusiastic and was about to say something when the established poet said, “And what would you talk about, John, cleaning toilets and making beds?” He then laughed out loud. This is the kind of humor that made Joyce call Ireland a sow that eats its own farrow, in that the harsh cliché is that one must always be bringing someone else down to size, what they call slagging in Ireland, and what I learned later from Australians is called tall poppy syndrome there. Basically it’s really demeaning someone a lot of the time because of one’s own insecurities. 

Anyway, the other writer, an American, went red, and after an uncomfortable silence asked me to help him move the desk in his room. In his room, I went to lift his desk. He stopped me and said he had only asked me to help him so that he could apologize for the rudeness of the Irish poet. I told him it was ok, that it wasn’t the first time someone “established” treated me like a receptionist, chauffeur, cleaner, etc. 

“How do you put up with that kind of treatment?” he said.

“I don’t. I just accept them the way they are. Years ago it used to make me very angry, but now, what are you going to do? They have their set idea of who I am, who you are, who they are themselves, their worldview, and I can’t change that.”

People might define me, you, as one thing, but I think that’s ridiculous, because all people are vast. They have many different parts. Yes, I can do a little electricity now. I repair old windows, put tiles onto roofs. I even cut down trees for wood, build old stone walls, optimize websites. If you’d told me I would be able to do any of those things twenty years ago in New York I would have laughed at you. Why? Because I used to think the same way as that poet. That a person is one dimensional. I thought, I’m a writer. Everything else is secondary. But it’s not. Being a husband is not secondary. A father can’t be secondary. We are many things. We are vast. When we accept that, we create a life, not play a role. We create ourselves.

An even better personal example: we couldn’t find a place to go create, to meet other writers and artists. So, we transformed the drudge of working the nine to five and having no time to create, into something. It took a while, but La Muse was created nearly twenty years ago. It wasn’t easy, but it was created, in the beginning out of anger that space was not available to us, but then, out of acceptance. We accepted the reality and then went out to change it, like the oft quoted phrase of Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

I’ll never be a Mozart, a Shakespeare. I don’t care. Why? I’m happy being me.  I can only be me. Life gets easier with acceptance. Ask yourself a question the next time you’re worrying about all those creators better than you: Do you really want to be better than them, their equal? Isn’t it enough to just be you? Isn’t it enough to create what you love, because if you deny what you love, are you not denying your life?

There’s a Latin phrase Marcus Aurelius uses a lot, “Amor fati”, which basically means accept, or love your fate. If you accept your fate, what life has given you, then you can create something from it. You can use your discontentment and loss as a positive, to create. You can transform it, move it into form. Then you can trans-form pain into something profound.

The facts of your life can also give you the very reason for your life. The events, the situations you’ve found yourself in, happened irrespective of your choices most of the time. So, why not accept them, so you can use them? 

Yes, you can’t change what happened but you can accept change. If you accept it, you can simply use what has happened to you to transform it into something beautiful, to create from that place, which will make you joyful at the same time.

Acceptance is easier when you can accept change. When you create, you change, as does the creation. That’s the process. 

Yes, we have no time. Or so we’re consistently told. But why not accept that idea and you know what then we do have time, even if we are being made to work more and more. We can change our lives for the better, even though change is stressful.

In 1974, William Bridges, an American literature lecturer, did just that. He left his job, set up group workshops about change, or more specifically what he calls transitions, in our society. Out of these workshops grew his book “Transitions,” which to date has sold over half a million copies. 

Bridges writes how dealing with transitions in life: marriage, divorce, birth, death, moving, career changes, retirement, is difficult, but that it can be made easier if we stop and see where and how we are processing the change in our life. He saw each individual experiencing change in three stages: first as an ending, then a stage of confusion and suffering, followed by a new beginning. Because Western culture gives us hardly any rituals to represent these stages, people just try to skip from an ending to a new beginning. 

Another important point Bridges makes is the distinction between change and transition, transition being “the personal side of change.” He says society often confuses them making us think that transition is just another word for change when actually a change is “situational” and a transition is “psychological”. Examples of a change are moving to a different city, getting a new boss, your mother dying, your son being born. They are external changes in your life. Transitions are how you deal with those changes inside. 

The creative process can help facilitate transitions. It can help keep the energy moving in body, mind and spirit. By creating we can give both expression and reflection to what we are experiencing, whatever transitions they are.

Creation will not come immediately. It takes time. You have to “transition” into it, not change everything immediately, give up your job, leave your family. To become a creator you start by accepting that change is difficult, that there are stages, that it is situational and psychological, and with awareness and acceptance you will create what you need to create, with patience and time.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American writer, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. And I’m giving you this one because I think it’s a great one to remind us to be humble, to have humility in the face of the difficulties of what we’re so often presented with, and that to accept, to really accept change, we often need to bow our head in humility to it in order to not resist life’s suffering. Literally, this one means: 

The heaviest ear of grain bends its head the lowest.

Is í an dias is troime is ísle a chromas a cheann

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

That was a favorite poem of mine, “The Peace of Wild Things”, by the American poet, environmentalist and farmer Wendell Berry.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 25 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Process, Retreats and Dark Nights of the Soul, but today I want to talk about distractions, awareness and sacredness.  

Philosophy used to be a way of life. Now, it’s something studied by experts so as to teach new experts. Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Lucretius, all the ancient philosophers didn’t study philosophy, they practiced it. It was a way of living. Buddhists and philosophers of the East call it meditation or as the wonderful Thich That Hanh would put it being Mindful. For the most part we would maybe call it thinking about thinking over here in the West, allowing ourselves to lose our minds instead of being Mindful. We’re not so much out of ours minds but too distracted by the thoughts inside our heads instead of being aware of those thoughts, aware. 

 As with Blake, and Plato’s cave, when I talked about them in episode 16, Doors and the Cave, when I first talked about Doors, you open the door to a new reality, a new awareness when you start to question the system or systems, the Walls, you’ve been conditioned to think are real when you become aware they’re really distractions, not something personal and sacred, but shadowplay on the walls of a cave. We have to step out of the cave, out of what Blake called the cavern, to really see, to see the light, to become the perceiver in order to really create, much like Wendell Berry talks about in his poem I just read, into what he calls the “peace of wild things”.

But there’s another layer to this, to awareness. Awareness is when we ask the question: Can the perceiver be perceived? This is the furthest we can go as a creative human being, out of the cave, away from the binary, the opposites, the duality of this world, into awareness. The door which opens nearest to this reality is when we ask the question: Can the perceiver be perceived? 

Everything we see in front of our eyeballs, all these sensory objects, everything, that’s us the Perceiver, perceive this world in front of us. And then, behind the eyes we perceive another reality, one of feelings, and thoughts, and memories. What Blake really meant was when we become aware of the other Eye with a capital E, or Eyes. Not this conscious state of eyes open, and eyes closed perception. Not the external and internal states. Instead the door to awareness is when we create an openness to whether the perceived is a something or a no – thing. 

Is this awareness? It can’t be some kind of intellectual door, some kind of philosophical/intellectual level perceiver, because that’s biased, a bias perspective. 

When we open this creative door what happens is that the perceiver and the object of perception both appear at the same time… and then this language disappears. We’re silent when we become aware of the vastness of awareness, the real Perceiver. Language is no good for describing the experience, the awe of awareness. The binary mind wants to hold on, maybe say what the experience is not, but language doesn’t work for the realization. It’s like a train. The train is running, and this question: Can the perceiver be perceived? slams on  the breaks of the train/mind but it keeps moving, even when there’s no energy being injected into it. It takes time to stop. So when we are in awareness, the thoughts, the mind keeps fighting to try to explain what is happening when it cannot explain this open door. Identity, language, they lose their power. So awareness comes when we wait, when we meditate and wait for the mind, the train, to exhaust itself. The ego and body want to keep moving, that way they are moving, they exist, but when you stop, become aware, whether it’s looking at a duck like Wendell Berry and calling awareness the grace of the world, or whether we call it awareness, what we are conscious of is that awareness is outside of the body and in it, everywhere, because it’s the end of the ego. The brakes of the train are the beginning of the end of the ego, when you sit down and watch, when you embrace the world by doing nothing. The ego doesn’t want you to do nothing, it wants you busy, to keep moving, attaching you to fear, what I called the Wall of walls in earlier episodes. The ego mind wants you to attach to attachment, personhood, the country you come from, the role in your family, how much you earn. Awareness? The opposite. It’s nothing, and everything, the witness, the Perceiver, but also the perceiver of the perceived and then it’s nothing again. It exists, and exists when we watch, when we perceive without the ego and the body. This is the door Wendell Berry opens in his poem. Stillness, not insecurity. Peace, not fear. Infiniteness, the infiniteness of the open door, identity, personhood, victimhood, “despair for the world” as he put it, nowhere to be seen. The grace he talks of is the grace of awareness, the great creative act, the stability of awareness. He sees, but not with his eyes. Instead he awakens into awareness by trusting what is really in front of him. 

The despair of the world Berry talks of wants the fear to enter into us, not the awareness. The fear wants to close the door to awareness, build walls all around your consciousness. It wants you to fail again, not trust awareness to open doors, instead of creating walls of polarities. Berry, to paraphrase his words, “for a time” rests “in the grace of the world” and is “free.” He is free because he is experiencing pure absolute awareness, a joyous emptiness, the infinite. 

This is a gift. This is grace. A gift from doing nothing, and that can only open in an experimental way, a creative doing, and this knowing is only experiental. You only arrive and rest in the grace of the world when you are aware of awareness, when you open the door to one of the most creative questions there is: Can the perceiver be perceived?

This awareness, this Mindful way of being which Berry and so many before him like Blake and others, is why this creative form of awareness is often understood as something sacred. To say it’s sacred means it’s something to be honored in a sense because we have to honor aspects of our self to be in the world in a Mindful way. One of these aspects is creation and this is why we have gods of creativity in every continent. In Ireland, an example would be Brigi or Bríg, who Christianity would have colonized as Saint Brigid. Called the Exalted One you could see her as an adaptation of the dawn goddess, dawn being another symbol of creativity because She creates the day from the darkness, delivering us from darkness you could say, out of that classical cave of Plato again. Bríg is associated with healing, Spring, fertility and poetry and smithcraft. An even more famous example would be the Muses, who we named the rooms in our retreat after, as they represented different Muses to certain arts. Even someone like Hephastos can be seen as representing aspects of creation. He literally forged, created, beautiful jewelry, objects and weapons. Then there’s Hathor and Isis in Eqypt, the Aztec gods who names I can’t pronounce, the Hindu goddess Saraswati, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, or Lono in Hawaii. 

If we don’t respect these aspects of ourselves, the creative aspects, then we are punished in some way. These aspects, or Gods are internal aspects of our creative selves that are expressed in external manifestations and stories, each religion having it’s own creation story, and then its own gods to honor so as to receive inspiration and creativity into your life. When people take these stories literally then they lose the profound insights and inspirations, the door to sacredness and awareness these stories are trying to tell us about ourselves, away from the distractions of blue screens, and other mental dross. Wendell Berry says it better to me in another poem. This one is called “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself),” found in his New Collected Poems. It goes like this…

i 

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii  

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

We used to always ask the ancestors for help with awareness. We’ve lost this sacred silent speech. The Romans used to have lares, the spirits of your dead family which meant acknowledging and honoring them daily. The Zen Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh who I mentioned earlier has this same awareness of those who went before us. The Roman had this kind of cupboard as a shrine in their home, the lararium, with little statuettes, the spirits of the family and spirits of the home as well as lares who protected the community. Daily prayers and offerings were made to the lares during the year. Again what Berry wrote:

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

And what takes us away from this silence, this creative awareness? Noise in all its forms. The Walls of blue screens, social media: all electrifying, disturbing the silence.  Day to day activities can be distractions too, walls, but since the introduction of the iPhone today’s teens in America are much more likely to say “A lot of the time I feel lonely” or “I often feel left out of things” according to a book written by Jean M. Twenge. She writes that teens are nearly always connected but are growing up less rebellious and less happy, being completely unprepared for adulthood. They’re also getting less sleep because they’re always on their devices, a lot of them bringing their phones to bed with them, irrespective of the fact that they need them for an alarm, but more because it makes them feel better.

At our retreat in France one of our American artists used to have what she called a technological sunup and sundown. She switches devices off before she paints and at least an hour before she goes to bed. She gets a lot of painting done. We, especially the younger generation, have to be like her — bookend your day. Like the beginning of your work day, no blue screens for a period of time, so the brain knows it has to slow down, rejuvenate itself. As a naturopath told me once, you have to train the brain, body, to decompress. It takes time. It doesn’t happen in a day or two. It’s like the train I talked of earlier. If it’s been driving fast all day and you slam your feet on the brakes, then you’ll come to a sudden, shocking stop. If you ease your foot gently on the brake, you will eventually come to a standstill. To Stillness. You can’t get to stillness immediately. It’s gradual, trained. In Ireland, just like every other country, there was always the seomra ciúin, the quiet room, where you sat beside the fire and crocheted or read. We’ve lost these quiet rooms, these quiet sacred spaces. Noisy screens have invaded them.

Capitalism doesn’t value stillness. It values speed, constant motion, again, the high speed train. Technology has sped everything up, but you can’t speed up the Imagination. The imagination works with the presence of stillness. Stillness is not online. If you are online you’re not in line with Imagination. As I said in an early episode on Imagination, Imagination literally means “to picture oneself”, to image oneself, to imagine oneself, which is a real understanding of creation, to investigate and picture from yourself, create from your images, your memories, your imagination, a visionary Blakean place where visions create mental concepts that are not actually tangible to the senses, but are there, present, nevertheless, coming out of the sacred silence of awareness. 

You can’t imagine a new reality if you’re online in the noise of the Internet, a place that wants you to produce the next thing now, and again in a few months, not in years. Productivity is not the field of Imagination. More products, more books, paintings, creations, afforded by the advent of the ever increasing speed of the Internet is not the path to the Imagination, but the path to commodification and capitalizing on product, not art. The so called disruptors really are that. They disrupt the imagination with their Amazonification of our Imaginative worlds.

Speed is everywhere but I still like to think there are people who value time, taking time to create something in silence out of the silence in a prayerlike state of awareness what some call flow. If the form in which we share our images, canvas, wood, disappears we’ll still have the image, it’s narrative or lack of narrative. If book objects transform, from paper and ink into ebooks then we’ll still have the narrative, the poem, the story. Why? Because ever since our beginnings around the silent, quiet, crackling cave fire we have told each other stories to understand ourselves, our rites of passage, our common thoughts, sensations, feelings and emotions and spiritual evolutions. We all still need the stillness, away from the digital noise. Even after overdosing on blue screens we always know we are hankering after stillness.

In economics they have the concept of velocity of money, where the poor spend everything they earn or have, and oftentimes much more than that, and where the very rich can never spend all the money they have because it’s always making money. So money is about speed too, literally, where time is money. If you’re unable to invest some of what you earn then you’re literally living in the fast lane, to use another cliche. So, as I talked about in the episode on capitalism, how are we supposed to live in a society where most of us are forever speeding along to try to decrease the velocity of our spending. The question then would be to ask whether there’s a velocity of creativity, a velocity of the Imagination, because some are able to take the time to invest in their creations where others it is very difficult. 

If you go to bed straight after being on blue screens, after working, after being frenetically active — after too much time on the fast train — how do you think your brain is going to react? It’s going to keep you awake. It needs a ritual, a habit, a sacred space like the Romans, in front of a cupboard, or Berry, where the wood drake rests, to slow down. And the next day, will you be able to get back to your work, revived, ready to put in another good day? No. Not if you don’t bookend your day.

Drugs, alcohol, all the rest. They’re seen as addictions. What the Buddha called “cravings”. So are blue screens. If you wake up in the morning and start texting then how are you supposed to create? What are your distractions? What do you do first thing in the morning? Do you watch the news? Read it on Twitter, Facebook? Do you answer email? Your mind/ego loves the Internet. As soon as you go online, you’re lost. Creation goes out the window. 

Are you a suffering artist? Do you get drunk to create? Do you smoke like a train? I used to do both. I thought it was part of my identity as a writer. Well, it’s bullsh*t, a myth I created for myself after seeing what other writers got up to. Negative myths are a distraction from the work. Again, it’s all about balance. Alcohol in moderation can actually be good for you. Look at all that resveratrol French and Italians get when they drink red wine. Look at how a glass of wine can chill a person out at the end of a day.

So, no blue screens in the morning, unless you’re creating with them. There are even programs you can download to stop you from being able to go online. Take the first 30 minutes to let the problem, chapter, painting, business plan, construction project sit in your head, as you meditate, drink your coffee, do your yoga. Something may not come every time, but the more you train your brain, the more inspiration will show up.

It’s a win-win situation. Why? Two reasons. You get back wasted time, and you start doing what you love. Then genius, your subconscious, inspiration has the space to appear. 

Another way of looking at it would be to ask the question: What do you do when you’re stressed? Do you go down the YouTube rabbit-hole? Do you get sucked into the Facebook feed? How about using that time, when stressed, to turn to what you love, to create. Meditate on it. Sit with it in that silent sacred space. 

If we add up all our little distractions minutes become hours become days. They become a huge hurdle to getting creative. Protect yourself from distractions with bookends and what some call technological avoidance tools, behavioral architecture?

So basically, awareness is one of greatest anti-distraction tools we have. Distractions are systemic, from small systems to larger ones. We have to become aware of the systems and share that awareness with each other, even if it’s disagreeable and difficult to talk about because of the conditioning we’ve all been “educated” by. Through awareness of the systems, institutions, we can then have compassion for other human beings who have never read about, discussed or experienced these distraction systems with awareness. Then we can bring awareness to the personal, to observe what’s right in front of us. All the mystics of every religion return to this. Every poet practices it.  Great creators inspire their creations with it. 

So, for one minute go to your sacred space and in silence do any of these: Meditate. Watch. Listen. Do an asana. Breathe.

I know. Today, a lot of people are afraid of solitude. You don’t want to be alone. It’s not acceptable. So many of us are so afraid to be alone with ourselves that we create noise all around us: TV, social media. Diversion, noise, keeps us from being aware. 

It’s very simple. Switch the noise off, but how many of us do it?

For a poem it could be the red flower in the nettles, the accidental sunlight on a stem or stone in winter. For isn’t that what reality is, something fleeting, never all the time, but moment-to-moment, something that just happens when we’re busy doing something with our lives, whether it’s experiencing the birth of a first child or meditating on the blooming of a flower or idea. It appears.

Of course this is hard to do today, because people are so busy being busy, which reminds me of Kierkegaard’s quote in “Either/Or”:

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.

When you get out of the way, when you meditate, listen, watch, the little voice of inspiration will come. Many creators do this when they are with other people. They’re quiet. Why? Because they watch and listen to others, then transform what they’ve seen into novels, philosophies, business plans. Novelists and screenwriters are notorious for this, especially when it comes to dialogue. 

So, you make the effort, because it’s an effort to train your mind, to develop awareness, what some call mindfulness, to be more loving to what is all around us, and then let the work lead you. If you show up consistently, with your awareness, then so will inspiration. And anyway, as Picasso put it, if you know exactly what you’re going to do, what’s the good in doing it?

Document your moments of awareness, what Aristotle called each “moment of being”. These moments can be transformed into creations, the painting of the fisherman’s line about to touch the water on a lake, Cartier-Bresson’s “Man Jumping Over a Puddle.”

Be aware of what is around you. Engage those realities with your awareness. Why? So they become inspirations to your creation, not Walls. Picasso painted “Guernica” because of the horrors of war. Tolstoy wrote “Anna Karenina” because he wanted to understand, after reading a newspaper article, why a woman would throw herself under a train. 

With awareness creators create their own worlds, their own “system” as William Blake called his own mythical creation. To Blake, and later Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others, awareness meant recognizing myths and their powerful interpretations and meanings, how they allow the individual to evolve. Blake’s awareness manifested itself in his wonderful mythic poems and engravings.  

It’s about watching how your thoughts and emotions create Walls within your reality, wherever you live. By being aware of what it is your mind is doing you can find ways to move through the walls, away from what Nietzsche called “the herd-instinct”.  

Creation comes when we become aware that the rational is not all there is. If we are aware enough, “irrational” enough, if we get inspired, mad, we create the world anew again. We re-create meaning out of the seemingly meaningless. 

I know I’ve been going on a while now but there’s one last thing I want to address as far as sacredness and awareness are concerned when we create.

“The Song of the Partisans” is sacred to a good friend of mine. It was the  most popular song of the French resistance fighters in World War II. Her uncles were resistance fighters. Her father was in a POW camp, and a concentration camp. It’s a song about the life and death struggle for national liberation. They almost made it the national anthem in France after the war.

When I told her Leonard Cohen had created his own version of the song she was outraged. To her, this was sacrilegious. It denigrated her family, their resistance to fascism. This is a very calm and intelligent women. But this upset her. She said people died to write that song about people who died for liberty. She said there should be a law against profaning creations like that. It’s a lack of respect for the love, the sacrifice all those people made during the war.

The Romany gypsies in the south of France are the same with their religious music, which is extraordinarily beautiful. When some of them recorded their music and released an album the rest of their people were outraged. To the gypsies, the music is sacred.

The word sacred literally means “set apart”, in Latin. So, what is set apart to you? What is sacred to you? Whatever it is, it’s probably a good place to create from, a good place to be aware from. You create what Heideggar calls a clearing, a place to think, pure thinking, not declaring anything, a placeless place apart from the noise where you can have an opening, a lightening, where openness allows you to shed light, where everything that becomes present and absent at the same time, an opening in the forest, set apart from the rest of the trees.

A lot of creators talk about the revelatory experience of creating, about it being a holy experience. A creation, like “The Song of the Partisans”, can be a sacred creation to a creative, not just the creator creating it.

You can pray to the Muses, like the Romans, Greeks and Homer did.  Or, don’t pray to anything, but honor something, the memory of someone you loved. Honor yourself. It’s better than honoring medals, windfalls or awards, especially when you’re trying to create. With honor and awareness a creation becomes sacred, meaningful, important, not just to you but to everyone.

So thanks for listening. I started with a poem from a great American writer and activist, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. It literally means: 

God never closed a door without opening another one.

Níor dhún Dia doras riamh nár oscail Sé ceann eile.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? …Simply, certain conditions are required.

That’s a quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, written by the French writer Albert Camus.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 24 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Balance, Health and Notebooks but today I want to talk about process and retreats and the dark nights of the soul.

On my journey as a writer I used to think pulling all-nighters was the way to write. It didn’t work. I used to think I had to write every single day. I don’t. I used to think I was a night creator, until I became a morning creator. Now, I’m an anytime creator, but I have a process. I repeat it, every day, until my first draft is done. This is the journey. You have to find your own process by doing and finding space and time to discover by making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not alone in this. Nearly every creator I’ve ever talked to about how they created something inevitably talks about their process, how they create a space and time for that process to grow into a creation.

In old French, process means “journey”, and in Latin, it means “to advance”. So, process is about the journey, not the end. We advance, we proceed, we journey into creation. It’s personal, because everyone is different, original.

So there’s no path to creation; you make the path by going on the journey because process is not a product, a finished product you walk on, journey along. And why is this? Because capitalism values product as the most important part of creation. Well, it’s not. Process is.

Process is hard work, but it can be fun if we’re not put under pressure. Going down a path you’ve never taken before, every day, is fun. It never finishes. It starts again and again. You never know what the character is going to say to the other character. You only know they’re in a garden. You don’t know why something appears in a painting while you’re painting. You advance a new process of manufacturing something, by mistake, by trying to figure out a solution. This is why process is associated with so many activities — arts, law, business, science, technology, thermodynamics, mathematics — because it describes so many different types of creative journeys.

At first, a good place to find your own working process is to study people in your field, as I mentioned in episode 19 when I talked about mentors. The best place to get information about the process of a creator you love, how they worked, is to read their autobiography, or biographies. There are many places online full of inspirational background information on the creative process of creators you love. You simply have to research them. Criticism, biographies are helpful, but a “Paris Review” interview, or a well written autobiography, are indispensable.

The best books to read on any process are, well, on process. Most of the time, when you go to the critics, you get information on the “end product”, the painting, the iPhone, the house. But does this show you how to go about painting, designing, or building those creations? No. You want to know how the creator went about creating it, not the thing itself. How did they do it.

Another important ingredient to process: How do you create space-time? As John Cleese says, you have to find a “space” where you can give yourself that “time” to connect with what some call flow, others genius, and what I call inspiration and the imagination.

Yes, this space can be created in your home or office, but what about what Cleese calls the “interruptions”, or what I call distractions: phone calls, ticking things off on lists, racing around all day? I’ll talk about Distractions in the next episode, alone with sacredness and awareness. Anyway, Cleese says if you are interrupted during your “creative state” then you lose the flow of what you were working on. Unless you create what he calls an “oasis of space-time” where there are “boundaries” of “space” and “time” then you can’t tap into inspiration, or what he calls creativity.

Boundaries can be difficult to create. This is OK. This is not. But if we stick to our own authenticity, your own integrity, that this is what I need to do, not what I want to do, then out of our own integrity and authenticity comes natural boundaries. Then, you do the work. You do the work just like you would for your day job. How long that is is up to you. Ninety minutes seems to be the most universally accepted amount of time, or so research shows. This is the time when creative work is optimal, before opening the blue screen in the morning, when you get into a deep kind of concentrated work. After that ninety minutes people are supposed to have diminishing returns. It makes sense too, because we operate on ninety minutes cycles in sleep. You get up at the same time every day as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it and you “sweat and labor.”

Stendhal used to give himself two hours every day. You can start in the morning like Auden. It can be late at night like Dostoyevsky. Faulkner used to say, “I get inspired, at 9 every morning.”

Hemingway, mornings. And they all created for a set amount of time. If they only wrote one word during those hours, well then that was the work for that day. Tolstoy wrote in the morning, preferably after a short walk.

I go for a short walk before I write. I didn’t steal it from Tolstoy. I do it because it makes me feel good. Flaubert frequently wrote twelve hours a day, beginning in the late afternoon and continuing through the night. He complained how his throat hurt from writing. Yes, he read every single sentence out, many times, until he got it right. I started reading my stuff out loud after reading about Flaubert. I found out Richard Ford reads his stuff out to his wife too. I did this for one novel then gave up on it. Flaubert rewrote each page of Madame Bovary at least four or five times, a lot of the pages as many as a dozen times.

I know a lot of musicians who write their songs on the road, performing. Many writers I’ve met need to be absolutely still in a blank room to get anything done. So process can be movement or stasis, or a combination of both. Certain creators need to be in movement. Many bands who were going to break up because they couldn’t create any new material discover new songs when they go on the road. So, do you create when you move, or in stasis? I do both. Notes in movement, stasis to transcribe and tie them all together by writing them down and feeling my way into imagination and inspiration.

Then there’s the process of retreating. Do you need to retreat into the woods for three weeks, or into what Virginia Woolf called a literal, and figurative, “room of one’s own”? Some people can write in a coffee shop, others need to have absolute silence and be staring at a blank white wall. Nabokov liked writing in hotels. Certain artists need to be in their studio, others need to be outside, as with the Impressionists.

Of course I think it a great idea to go away or retreat to a space for a specific amount of time to create. You go into the “wilderness” like a Thoreau or any of the people who go on retreats to places like the one we created – La Muse. A lot of those creators do this every year. It doesn’t have to be completely isolated. Thoreau went home to his mother’s for meals.

So you bring your idea, your talent and your intention. A retreat gives you space-time away from the real world, and a support system to make the most of your stay and get a block of work done that would have been impossible at him. The thing with a retreat though is that you will be doing your “work” with a group of people who have went there too for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through. If we are talking about a sustained amount of time to really get into your project without interruptions then a retreat can be very productive.

Ultimately you have to have the right conditions to be able to make the effort to get inspired. Inspiration and genius are in all of us. However, we are not all truly receptive all the time as it takes a huge effort when surrounded by the vicissitudes. It takes courage to be receptive and to create. Places like La Muse, the retreat we created in France, are spaces designed to reduce these “interruptions.” “Quiet Hours” and the natural, tranquil setting allow for creative ideas to seed and grow.

Sure, you can optimize those conditions in your own life whether it’s with meditation or a non-negotiable writing routine, but it does help to get a boost, to say the least, by going on a retreat. Just creating those conditions at home can take years. Establishing them in a retreat and then bringing them back home with you would be even better. As opposed to having to fight through your routine to form a creative schedule you can retreat and establish your process and be encouraged by the example of other creative individuals so you have no excuses to not do your work, because they’re doing theirs, by practicing their process.

If I need to get a big chunk of work done, I retreat. It can be a week. Three days, a long weekend. As much as four weeks. I’ve been doing them for years.

I recently found out Kazuo Ishiguro does retreats, but instead of a retreat, he calls it a “crash”. He only writes. All day. Six days a week. He takes an hour off for lunch, two for dinner. No email. No phone. No guests, visitors. This way his fictional world becomes more real than his real world. He immerses himself in his creation.

Retreat means to withdraw, detach from the world to find your inner world. Retreats do not have to be weeks long. They can be a weekend. Also, you can have regular short retreats, short withdrawals to create in notebooks. I used to retreat in the truck waiting for writers and artists to get their shopping done. I retreat waiting for the kids to finish school, sitting outside the conservatoire for them to finish their music, on trains, planes. I write. It could be notes on a character. Half a chapter. Backstory. Some dialogue. This is what I call regular creation.

Of course, you’ll need support to get away. Others will have to give up time so you can take time. But this is an opportunity for those you love to support you, and it is something you can then offer them.

The whole idea is to resource yourself, and really get into your creation. In French a “source” is a water source, like the one at La Muse, where people get fresh mountain water, but it can also mean something deeper. On retreat residents go out every day to re-source themselves by filling up a glass bottle. When it’s empty they know they have to go back out again, and each time they come back refreshed to their work, inspired.

This is what a retreat can give you. It can re-source you, give you the time to decompress from the stresses of contemporary life to actually figure out what you want to create. Peers, other creators, people on the same wave-length, and sometimes on the same path creatively as you, are another benefit. Retreats can give you large blocks of space-time to create. The thing with La Muse and places like it is that you will be doing this “work” with a group of people who have come for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through.

Retreats are spaces designed to reduce distractions and walls, but they’re not the only places to go. There are residencies and fellowships too. The idea is to allow yourself to see the big picture of where you are, but more importantly your creative future. A lot of the time they can also house professional creators who host workshops to help you learn your craft better. And again, there is also regular creation, taking moments and minutes to document or create while waiting for the kids, the spouse, until you can find the time to get away for longer.

So, need to really focus on a specific project? Then get rid of all distractions. Movies. Books. Phone. Everything. Find space-time, and if you need a really focused block of it then retreat. We’re all different. Some people can retreat in their own house, in a library, a writers room. You have to have faith in your own process, but first you have to find out what your process is.

And another thing, another fundamental part of process: what I call the Dark Night of the Soul. And what is this? Well, from my own perspective, when I write a book I always want to give up at the end. When I’ve spent months and years writing a novel, and I’m sick of looking at it, I want to stop. If I have to edit it one more time I’ll literally want toburn the whole thing or chuck the computer out the window. I just can’t do it any more. All is lost.

Well, it’s not. This is when I know it’s nearly finished. When I can barely stand to look at it any more. Like every movie, the hero finds a way of beating the bad guy, no matter how lost they feel near the end. They get up out of their wallowing and finish the job in the final act.

You’ve nearly finished a book, a chair, a business plan. This is what they call the “All is lost” moment in screenplays, which then turns into the “Dark Night of the Soul” or wallowing. It’s the nearly done moment. This is what divides the creatives from the creators. Finishing. Entering the third act.

It doesn’t matter how crap you think your chair, book, business plan is, you have to finish it. It’s the only way to go on, to create another one, a better one. Only by doing, do we get better. But the mind/ego, the walls, they’re always highest near the end of a project.

Like the Romans when they hit Scotland. They couldn’t kill all the Scots in the Highlands. So they built a wall to keep them out of the South. Basically, they failed. They gave up. They didn’t finish the intended project of conquering the Scots, but finished another project instead: Hadrian’s Wall. It’s beautiful, and it’s still standing, even if the Scots are still there, and the Romans are gone. The Romans finished their creation. They couldn’t achieve their complete goal, beating the Scots, but they kept them out of England.

In France, they have an expression: “A house is never finished.” Creation is a house. It’s never finished because you could go on renovating your creation forever. There are many rooms in your creative house. Each room has specific purposes, but each one needs to be functional. It’s better to have a functional kitchen, than one without a sink, or a bathroom without a shower. Everything else could be perfect, but one important part is missing. You have to walk into each of your creative rooms, and not allow the walls, the negative voices of self-sabotage, fear, myths, ageism, elitism, perfection, stop you finishing them.

Basically you have to allow yourself to accept that what you are creating is not perfect. It’s simply a room. Then self-sabotage won’t have as strong a hold on you. Nothing is perfect, something I talked about in episode 10. Every masterpiece has its flaws. The chapter that just goes on for ever. The skirt with the unaligned hem. That one actor destroying a scene of an otherwise amazing film. You wrote the screenplay, but you can’t control the direction, the acting.

This is what Beckett meant when he said fail better. Do your best. Put it out there, and then let it be. Jump of the cliff as Vonnegut put it and learn how to fly on the way down.

Of course people like Nabokov can’t help themselves. They come back and re-write novels that have been out for years, decades. But this is not the point. The point is to know that no how matter how great someone is at creating in a field, we all think what we do could be better. But, at some stage you have to stop, and a lot of the time if you don’t, if you keep revising, changing your creation, it can turn into a real failure, something over worked.

Know that it’s okay to let go of a creation. Work on a different project for a while, or move on to the next one. We learn from each thing we create. Each thing we finish allows us to get better at what we create. Empower yourself. Get better. This way you’ll continue to enjoy what you’re creating. Get past the dark night of the soul. Finish, and move onto your next creation.

And before sending something out into the world, wait, rest. You’re not on a “deadline”. Forget the capitalistic deadline orientated culture of instant gratification. Creation is as natural, as organic and essential as breathing, every hour, every day, a lifetime. We don’t have to finish the creative process. We are not going to die if we don’t get over the “line” of some imagined deadline. Think of what you have created as a due date. The baby isn’t always “cooked” on the due date. Nothing is ever perfect the second it comes out of you. It gets revised, edited, redone, changed. This is part of the process. It is born, but it needs time to open its eyes, for you to see what it is with clear eyes.

Writers do this all the time. They leave a novel, essay, poem for a period of time, say two or three months, then come back to it. They leave what Anne Lamott calls “the shitty first draft” alone and go work on something else.

This also goes for artists, business people, musicians. There will be parts of what you have created that are wonderful, that barely need any re-working, but there will be a lot of it that needs to be re-visited.

Let the dust settle. Rest yourself, but more importantly, let the work rest. Give it time. Then return to it. By resting the work a creator is not in the creation any more but allowing the process to continue of its own volition. Creators get out of their work so that they can make it better when they return to it. If you give a creation to people before it’s really ready you do a disservice to the work, but also to the person you’ve given it to. You’ll be forcing them to judge something underdeveloped, and to have to tell you it is too when they won’t want to. It makes more work for them. Rest with your work. Wait.

So, the question is: what’s your process? What rhythm is best for you? Night? Daytime? One hour? Two hours? 12 hours like Flaubert? When is your most productive time? When do you come up with new ideas? Knowing “your time” makes you consistent. It allows you, helps you to show up on time to work, every day. You have to ask yourself the question: how do I process ideas, words, images, reality best? When is my best time, to process? Words in the evening, or words in the morning? Ideas in the morning and evening? Well, then that’s your process. For me deep creation, inspiration, happens in the mornings. The afternoons are good for communal creation, left brain creation.

T. S. Eliot wrote poems and plays partly on a typewriter and partly with pencil and paper. He always kept to a three hour writing limit. In the beginning he wanted to go for longer, but then when he looked at his stuff the next day, what he’d done after three hours was never good enough. He thought it better to stop and think about something completely different to return to the work fresh the next day. Da Vinci would spend an hour in front of “The Last Supper”, add one paint stroke and leave.

Process is not a straight line. You don’t sit down and write a whole novel, day by day, from start to finish, unless you’ve written a whole lot of them already, like say a John Steinbeck. (If you’re to believe his diary about the writing of “East of Eden”, he wrote it straight.) Most people aren’t that lucky. Most of the time, in the beginning anyway, it’s disorganized, messy, and you have to know about parts of the process, like the dark nights of the soul and the waiting and resting, every creator has to go through before they finish any creation.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a great French writer and philosopher, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. It literally means:

However long the day, the evening will come.

Dá fhada an lá tagann an tráthnóna.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.