The End of The World

Here is a poem by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

Until I read this poem I had never heard so perfectly expressed my own fear of extinction - a fear born from rationality yet failing ultimately in irrationality, which made it all the more horrifying for a time.

The Intellect's fear of extinction, fearing that it itself is all there is, and knowing that it is temporary and so no matter what it perceives all about itself, no matter that the dead leaves of the winter tree form fertile ground for spring buds, no matter that the shark eats the minnow is eaten by fisherman is eaten by the bear is eaten by the worms and bugs are eaten by the hummingbird is eaten by the tomcat is subsumed into the earth and made fertile for the tree where the hummingbird lives and flies over the sea of the minnow and the shark - no matter any of that, an end comes nonetheless that the poor, chained, obedient intellect can see only, rationally, as nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all.

It was the same extinction feared by the Great Bomb, which poised and hovered over my childhood and two decades worth of childhoods before mine, which William Faulkner referenced in his Nobel Speech:

"There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

Because the intellect, father of reason, stepfather of justice, the intellect which took us out of the cave and the hut and put up high strong walls against the wind and snow, and taught us to wash our hands before we cut one another open, that taught us to irrigate, to heat our homes in the winter, to cool them in the summer, taught us to use this computer and land a man on the moon - the intellect, which necessarily severed ties with a monarchical overseer so we could be free, also, in a baby-with-the-bathwater moment, abandoned the home of the soul, the eternal sovereign soul, because, it seemed to us in the great roaring, climbing, shining, warring, bombing, explosive, expansive twentieth century, that the intellect and the intellect alone was going to keep us safe.

Only the intellect had built these walls and these cars and these bombs and these everythings, the intellect, stepfather of justice and creator of democracy, the intellect must be free, must not be servant to anything it cannot see or measure of argue against. All the rest that could not be seen or measured or argued with was superstition, and superstition is the end of justice and therefore the end of equality and so a return to hut and the cave and a return to fast and certain death.

And yet without the home of the soul, death becomes nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all. The brain will end. It will be subsumed. It is tissue and change comes to everything and the brain will no longer be the brain and all the intellect it held will in fact be gone forever. And yet even at the height of all the post modern irony, and brainy irreverence, even in the middle of all of this, Thomas Pynchon wrote a book called Gravity's Rainbow, a book about a group of people in WWII London, the war that birthed The Bomb, a book about a bunch of people waiting to be blown up, and yet in this book about people worried about rockets from Germany raining down on them, worried about when their end will come, this book begins with this quote from Wernher von Braun, father of modern rocketry:

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."

and ends with the following ditty:

"There is a hand to turn the time,
Though thy glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road
All through our crippl'd zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside
And a soul in ev'ry stone . . .

Now everybody—"

Freedom of Choice

Without a sovereign soul there is no free choice, and without free choice, there is no creation.

A sovereign soul does not answer to an external God, a personal God, who is responsible for all creation, who set the laws of good and bad to which we all aspire. If our only CHOICE is to abide by God's laws or not, or to create what pleases God or not, then we do not in fact have free choice. Our laws, our right and wrong, our creation, must be all our own, or these choices are not free. The RIGHT choice must not be predetermined or else it is not a CHOICE at all but is, rather, merely an elaborate correct answer on some great test designed by a separate, omniscient consciousness.

On the other hand, if we are only organic machines, plumbing and wiring with a computer brain to run it all, then we are not free. If we are merely evolutionary respondents to some primal tic, we are not free. If our CHOICES are merely RESPONSES to some genome, to some evolutionary desire to survive and procreate, then this is not freedom. Either our choices are sovereign, are original, come from US and not some reaction, or they are not. They cannot be both.

Therefore, the machinery of us, our brains and our loins and our skin, merely responds to the soul, which is the origin of all creation. Without a sovereign soul, without something free of the ineluctable, Newtonian response of action and reaction, or chemical compounds, or genetic code, without this eternal, sovereign force energy, we are not free. We are just responses.

I reject any idea that claims I am anything but free. I reject I as the machine. I reject I as the servant of an external God. I am I. I am sovereign. I was put here to create, and unless I am free, I am either responding or answering a test. There is no right answer to life. And life is not some cold, unavoidable response. Life is original. Every moment as original as the one that came before.

You Are What You Believe

People often wonder what they or some other believes. In fact, you need look no further than the very moment you are standing in to know what it is you believe.

Your entire life is the culmination of what you believe, because your entire life is the culmination of every choice you have ever made, and every choice is based upon what you believe. Even those who say they "believe" in the Bible or the Torah or the Koran actually only believe in themselves, for no one, no matter how devout, follows every book to the letter. Even if they wanted to they could not - as soon as the book is closed they begin to reinterpret it for themselves.

So I say make your belief conscious. Do it on purpose. It's all you're going to be anyway. Like it or not, you are a sovereign soul. You are the sole creator of your life. Your are the thinker of your thoughts. Nothing you will ever do will be anything but the culmination of your thought, which is what you believe. So decide what you believe. Look at your actions. Every action is the expression of a belief.

If you believe in love, you must show love. If you believe in war, then make war. If you believe in autonomy, be autonomous. Belief, in the end, is intention, and intention is the fuel that fires action. And the action becomes the sticks and bones of the "reality."

You are what you believe.

Choose Your Words

I am now wary of any argument involving ad hominem arguments of any kind, no matter how mild or seemingly playful. They are used so frequently and so casually it seems sometimes that they are merely one more potent weapon in one's rhetorical arsenal. In fact, they are little more than the dead-end back alley of discussion, a little conversational terrorism.

Too strong, you say? No, this is not an argument for sentimentality, which I read described once as, "Showing anything more tenderness than God would show it." Rather, it is a call for courage. Everywhere about us is contrast. If you want to stand alone, to be allowed to express your unique manifestation of God, so you must understand that everywhere about you are all the others striving to do that very thing themselves.

Although every soul springs from the same universal pool of love, although every soul, at it's core, is an expression of that love, how each individual achieves the portal to their soul - what journey they take, the choices they make, their preferences and tastes - are all that define one soul from the next. The difference is in fact just as essential as our universal love, for without difference there would be no creation, which is choice, with is life.

This does not mean that you should be required to view all choices as equal. This does not mean you should never share your opinion with another (for what am I doing at this very moment?) nor that you should never try, through reason and compassion, to turn another away from a path you believe is destructive to them or another. But HOW will share this opinion? HOW will you steer another?

If you resort to ad hominem arguments, to name-calling of any kind, you have chosen the path of fear. The insult is an attempt to demoralize another person into silence. You offer no evidence, no understanding; at the moment of insult you accuse them of a crime (stupidity, simplicity, vanity) for which no trial has been offered. They may defend themselves, but against what? The point of the insult is NOT to engage, but to silence. The person making the attack feels, on some level, that this other perspective simply cannot be. It must be stopped. The ends justify the means. And yet, in attempting to silence another without engaging them, without understanding them, it shows that you yourself are afraid that their point of view might hold even some merit. And if it holds merit, then perhaps, you worry, yours holds none at all.

This is so often why religions find themselves bombing one another. One religion is defining God in a way that is anathema to how another religion defines it. Both beliefs, it would seem, cannot be simultaneously true. And so, instead of venturing down the dangerous path of another opinion, which might mean change, which would be dangerous because we have made some decisions with how the world is and we feel safe with them and we don't know if we'll feel safe with a new definition, we simply bomb the other one. Remove it from existence. God is safe.

So choose your words with care. If someone holds a point of view different from yours, engage, yes, but do so only with the goal of understanding. Only through understand will change for the greater good ever be realized. Insults bring either more insults or stony, grudging silence. Understanding says, I know you have come to this world from a place of love, and that you wish to return to that place of love just as I am. Let us work together to see the clearest and straightest route to where we all wish to go.

The Art of What is Not Said

Here is something Emily Dickenson wrote that I find very beautiful:

That love is all there is
Is all we know of love.

What is remarkable about this short verse is what is NOT said. Reading this, I believe this statement is true, and yet there is no argument being made. What makes these lines so effective is how much WE fill in. I, for one, believe that Love is all there is, and so when I read that first line, I think, Yes, you're right. And then I read the second line. This second line tells us that this thing that we know is true, which is in fact the sum of all life, is a mystery. A mysterious truth. How wonderful. And yet she doesn't say THAT. All she says is

Is all we know of love.

But this is all art. All art is metaphorical. Art is not a documentary. Hamlet is not about whether you should avenge your father. The odyssey is not about how to get home from war. Ulysses, for that matter, is not about how to buy soap. All art is metaphorical. And the power of the metaphor is the contribution made by the listener, the audience. Art becomes an interpretation. But the artist must create fertile emptiness into which the audience's imagination is impelled to flower. Great artists, then, are master of what is not said.

This then is the most gracious job for the artist. They are there to inspire others to create. Art, the sharing of art, becomes a shared creative experience. No one is passive. For consider: what the audience fears is inside the closet is bound to be worse than whatever the horror film maker might put there. They may not be picturing anything specific, but their imagination fills in with horrific abstractions.

There is no escaping participating in your own life. Art, at it's very best, impels us to create what is most meaningful to us.

My Hero

As I said earlier, I think the Bible is a work of art, part poetry, part narrative. As in any great narrative, there are characters, and, likewise heroes. I think that, at least in western tradition, there is probably no more valuable a hero than Jesus Christ.

My take on Christ is that the Man Jesus lived and taught and was crucified. For whatever reason, then, mankind was ready to take this story of this man Jesus and turn it into the story of Christ, he who "was of the spirit" or "not of the world." The story of someone who said that he must die to his body to live fully as spirit.

I think this is everyone's story, everyone's struggle. Over and over again in our lives we are asked to die to our body, to make some choice that does not seem to have our immediate, earthly needs in mind. And I am not talking just about the 30 year-old firemen of the world who rush into burning buildings to save 85 year-old women. Why risk another fifty years of life to save a life that could easily die tomorrow of natural causes? I am also talking about something so simple as leaving a job you have held for twenty years that pays every bill and your insurance and your retirement because you want to go back to school to learn to write music.

We all define safety in our own ways, and at some point we are asked to make a choice that, in the immediate moment, puts this safety at risk. We put this safety at risk, usually, because we say, "We have to be ourselves," or "It just felt like what I had to do." This is the spirit talking. But the spirit offers no guarantees beyond a direction. It is that hand that points, it cannot paint a picture of where you will be or how you will get there, it can only point.

And so we are all Christ at one time or another. And thus we created the story after 300 some odd years and then wrote it down once we'd got it right. Because we needed it, just like we've needed all art, which reduces life down to its essence, so we can see it clearly, stripped of dull extraneous stuff, and remember again why the journey is worth it.

Body and Soul

I believe the dynamic struggle that defines the human experience is the tension between the immortal spirit living within the mortal flesh.

The body knows it will die. The body and its obedient retriever The Brain have been programmed with a clear directive: Survive. Survive, survive, survive. Such it is with all life. All life wants to live, all life wants to survive. And yet, if all we think about is survival, if all we think about is ourselves and our flesh, how quickly things go awry. Greed, hubris, lust and on down the seven deadly sins are all expressions of a psyche consumed with the survival of the flesh or the satisfaction of the Ego.

The soul, meanwhile, is eternal, knows it is eternal, and has, as a result, an eternal perspective. The soul is not afraid of death. The soul is not afraid of pain or poverty or scorn. And yet the soul must contend with the very real need of the body to stay alive. If the body does not stay alive, the soul cannot express itself in this form. If the soul were merely to stay in its energetic eternal state, there would not be this dynamic tension. Chastity, humility, charity and so on all ask us to live not from our earthly needs but from something higher. And yet each of these great qualities seems to put our body or our ego at risk.

And so our lives are characterized by this tension. This is why religions sprout up all over the world and why they all preach, in one form or another, obedience to something higher, which is ultimately the spirit, which is God. The spirit, interestingly, cannot lead you astray. And yet to listen to it always requires setting aside your fear of death. And so the tension.

Happiness, by the way, occurs when you live from spirit. You have found that spiritual vibration. It is the difference between riding with the current or against the current. As the song goes:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

So true.

A Little Blasphemy

A few thoughts on The Bible and Church.

I think that The Bible is literature, the church, theater. I do not mean theater derogatorily - that is, theater in the sense of something phony and distracting. No, I mean theater as art. Both are art forms.

The Bible is really many books. It is somewhat Historical (all those Kings and begettings and so on), somewhat a How To, but mostly literature. All art, I believe, is about creating fertile ground upon which an audience member's imagination can grow. Art always leaves open space; the best art is about creating the most dynamic and fertile open spaces.

Such is The Bible. We need only see the vast disparities of interpretations of it to understand it is literature. It would be easy to say of true believers who cherry pick the bible to their own liking, Oh, you hypocrites! But this is not so constructive. Yes, it would be better if True Believers acknowledged that they take what they like and discard what they don't, but so don't we all. The Bible's goal, like all art, is to encourage you along the journey into your soul. If The Bible does that for you, great. If it does not, no matter. There are plenty of other things that can.

Likewise, church is theater. Theater is a ritualized, rehearsed, scripted event, with a passive audience who willingly subject themselves so that they might be directed to their own souls. For this reason, no one should stand up in a theater and cry out, Boo! Any more than you should stand up in a synagogue and cry "Allah is great!" We are tempted some times, but that is because part of us WANTS to subject ourselves to whatever theater is occurring even when that theater does not resonate with us, and the result is dissonant. Let it go. There's plenty of theater all around.

What Are You?

Einstein once said that the most important question you can ever ask yourself is, "Is the world friendly or unfriendly?"

Put another way, "Do you believe life happens TO you, or THROUGH you?"

I believe it must happen through you, that there is no other possible means for life to occur. That is, you are the sole architect of all your experiences, from your birth to your death. There are few who would argue that you are in NO way responsible for your life, that you are quite literally a pinball scattered about by physics, or God, or Zeus, but far more would argue that SOME of life happens to you, and that you are responsible for the rest.

I say, no. It is all or nothing. There is a long argument to be had around this question, and I will not have it here, but consider this: What is your life? Is your life what HAPPENS or what you FEEL after, or while, something happens?

If you were handed a million dollars, you would say - Oh, my life is changed. The million dollars changed my life! But no. The million dollars only changed your life if you decide to spend it. If you don't touch it, it is as meaningless as any other piece of paper. I knew a man once for whom this was true. He died in a very unhappy state, quite alone, and yet his car was filled with uncashed checks. He was worth at least a million dollars. Yet he would not even bring himself to touch it.

Likewise, let us say you have met someone and you believe they would be your perfect mate. And yet, sadly, they are not interested in you. "Oh, cruel life!" But no. What you wanted was not actually THAT person, but the FEELING you believed that would come as a result of that relationship. That feeling is not dead. That feeling is still possible with another person, for in fact, because you never had the relationship with the first person, the feeling was only something you had imagined. You were creating an IDEA of how you wanted to live; it just had not manifested yet in the first person you met that seemed to match that manifestation.

Life happens through you. Your life is what you are feeling about what is happening to you. You are the creator. You are, in fact, God, ever creating and creating and creating. You cannot stop if you wanted to, for you will no doubt go on creating once you have left this body. Every idea is a creation, every fantasy, every thought. Nothing has ever been done that has not been thought first. Thought is the beginning of all life; thought is life itself.

What do you think?

What Have I Done?

I worked the same job for sixteen years. The job was what I did while I was waiting for an opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. The story I told myself about the job was this: I must do this job because I need money and this is the best paying job I can stomach while I wait to do what I really love.

As the years went by and I was still doing the job, I found myself in the same cyclical quandary. I needed the job, I did not like the job, but I did not want to be miserable while I was there. So I made the best of it. And yet, year after year, I identified myself more and more with the job. And then, in fits of depression, I would hate the job, spit at the job, because it was not what I wanted to do. But the bills were due, and I was afraid, and I would go back to the job.

I was trapped, I told myself. What I really wanted wasn't happening and so I was trapped. I told myself I was living a nightmare. I actually said to myself, "This is my nightmare." Stuck in a life I would never have chosen. If that is not a nightmare, what is?

And then one day, I decided to leave. I knew it was not going to be easy, so I gave myself several months. Each day I went into work knowing I was leaving, something changed about it. Perhaps the biggest change of all was this: I realized I had MADE the job. I had created it. Everything about it, everything that kept me there, was my own doing. I had made it so the job meant something to me when in fact it did not. I had made it so I needed the job, even though I did not. I had built the cell, forged the key, locked the door, and then spent year after year rattling the cell bars, crying how I wasn't free. I felt like the man in a movie who comes home one day to find his wife and children killed and then spends the entirety of film searching for justice and answers only to learn, at the grim conclusion, that he had in fact murdered them himself in his sleep.

So it is for all our nightmares, I believe. In our sleeping nightmares, our own imagination conjures our greatest fears for us to live through. In our waking nightmares, we build the dream daily from the belief that we are not free.

This is a little daunting at first, at least for me. I thought, Jesus, if I can create THIS, my worst nightmare, just because I wasn't paying attention, what else could I do? Why, anything, of course. If you want the gift of freedom, you must take it in its entirety.

If You Want to Meet Yourself

There is a self you will only know if you cross the bridge you have avoided your whole life. This is the bridge you believed you could never cross. It was a bridge you believed was not strong enough, was blown by winds too strong, or led to another world about which you knew too little, or had perhaps heard too much.

To cross this, you must go alone. It is only wide enough for one. In fact, this may have been what kept you from crossing in the first place. When you travel across this bridge, you will be journeying into silence, into the choice you believed was never a choice.

That is where you will meet yourself for the first time; that is where your soul resides - within silence, at the far end of a narrow bridge, calling to you to choose a path that you had long believed led to death.

Twin Devils

I discovered the power of art when I was boy. The story goes that as an infant I curled up against the stereo speaker when Beethoven was playing.

Once I was old enough to walk upright, art become my religion. Novels, poems, movies, music, plays - all of these distilled life down to its essence, asking the audience, and myself, to only focus on what truly mattered, which, in almost all cases, was the supremacy of the human soul.

And so I would become an artist. I would become an artist first, because I wished to distill MY life down to its essence just as other artist had done for theirs; and second, because I wanted to give someone else the gift I felt I had been given by e. e. cummings, Tolkein, Beethoven and all the rest.

But then comes faith, and his noble second, courage. Without these, you cannot get where you wish to go. Why? Because once I was on my own, out of the shelter of childhood, then came the issue of money. And then also came the issue of approval, which I dubbed fame. These two devils arrive in the form of questions. What if I can't make any money distilling my life down to its essence? Or what if I make money, but I am not deemed "great?" Without both of these, how will my body and ego survive?

Such is the choice of every hero, or course, be they artist, politician, or lawyer. At some point, the question comes, "But how will I survive?" The "I" is always the body and the ego. How? But there are no certainties, and the so the answer will always be, "I don't know," and the twin devils are satisfied.

Fear knocked at the door; faith answered, and there was no one there. There is no other answer. Every artist, every hero, every soul, is faced with this question. What if ? Only faith gets you through. A better question to ask is, "What if Martin Luther King hadn't marched? What if the Beatles had stayed lovable and cute? What if Bob Dylan thought, 'I can't sing'? What if Hemmingway had thought, 'No one wants to read a book without a lot of adjectives'?"

You are Hemmingway. You are Martin Luther King. You are Bob Dylan, and Lennon, and McCartney. You are all of them, and the question will be asked of you. What will you answer?

Skill Level

Technical skill, if applied with integrity, rises to the level of the intention of the artist. Thus, for Luciano Pavarotti to achieve his artistic intention - that is, to use the human voice with same range and quality of sound as any other orchestral instrument - he had to train and bring his technical mastery to a level where that was possible. And even beyond that, Pavarotti set FOR HIMSELF his own unique level, a level no one else could define, to which he pushed himself and his technique.

By comparison, Bob Dylan had a very different artistic intention. His voice, while not nearly as capable of range or purity of sound as Pavarotti, nonetheless served as an ideal vehicle for his songs. Dylan set an intention for his music, and his skill rose to meet it and the outcome, for many - most notably Dylan himself - was complete. Whether the work moves this one or that one is not the point. The intention was fulfilled, and there is nothing more Dylan or any other artist can expect.

Where a work "fails" is where the artist does not push his skill to the level of his intention, or where his intention is too vague to begin with. Your intention cannot be to be as good as Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas. Your intention cannot be to write something that would "impress the critics," nor to sell a million books. These are merely outcomes, not an artistic intention.

By the same token, you must be patient and disciplined to push your craft to the level necessary to complete your vision. Only you will know when this has occurred. If you give up before the intention has been reached, if don't push your craft, if you imitate past successes, then the work will not meet its intention, and will feel incomplete. Incomplete work will be criticized for all sorts of reasons, none of which, by and large, will be accurate.

Your intention must be your unique, aesthetic vision. Everyone is born with one, not everyone is willing to pursue theirs with complete integrity and faith. If you pursue your own voice, there is no model for you to compare yourself to, and thus you are setting off alone into the forest of your own imagination. Go on.

But the question must never be, "Am I a good writer?" The only question is, "Have I written what I meant to say?" And do not wonder if you "can." You would not have been handed a challenge greater than your capabilities. You were born with it. That is the deal, and it's a fair one. Now you do your part and speak what you were meant to speak.

The Only Security

The only security is creation. Rivers run dry, factories close, loved ones die, nations collapse - and yet there is no ruin. The fertility of life itself remains undimmed by loss. The ashes of the forest fire are the bed of new life, the hollowed storefront becomes a coffee house, the widower finds love in the spinster's arms.

Creation is life's only constant. And yet we live every moment at the edge of the universe, straining to see through the opaque future. The darkness there is as absolute as black water, offering you its faceted reflection, yet moving away from you with every step. Seek another current. The current of creation runs through you, for you are life's tributary. The security lies in your creation. That is the force that moves. The creation is the present and future.

You may curse uncertainty in the fallow field of despair. Where are the landmarks and road signs? How wide is this ocean? And yet if all were known, what would there be to make? It is to that great Unknown that you offer the fruits of your creation. The future is not unknown and unfriendly, it is open and limitless. It is the perfect receptacle for whatever you create. You offer and it receives, for there is always room for more.

No one wants to know how he will die any more than he want to be told how he will live. Weep for your loneliness, pull the shutters to the storm, rage against indifference, but when the clouds have dried, celebrate creation. Without darkness we would never discover light.

A Loyal Companion

Despair will always be your most loyal companion. He is never far, and you do not have to call loud for him to come. Just a thought, and he is there, and he will stay as long as you ask him to.

In fact, he may stay longer. You will become accustomed to his company and not trust yourself without it. Despair is there to offer his ungilded opinion and keep you from harm's way. He will remind you how you had thought you did not need his advice, and look at the disappointment you suffered.

Despair knows disappointment well. Whenever you suffer disappointment, he will be there to see if his services are needed. He will come armed with certainty. He will promise you no more disappointment for the rest of your life. Who knows what will ever be? he says. If you put any faith in that which you cannot see, disappointment is inevitable. There is, therefore, only one solution.

That is why you must politely decline the advice of any councilor who councils anything other than, "Go." He whispers forever against that which cannot be seen, and all creation is unseen except in the mind of the creator. Life itself is a creation, not some maze to be navigated. Despair will hint that he knows the way through the maze, but the maze is a fiction. The future is infinitely open. You must choose. And choose you must faith over despair.

Faith is more loyal still because it calls you on and trusts you. Tell me where to go, faith asks. Faith reminds you that you are the captain. It's a boat for one. Despair should never be a welcome traveler. He will come aboard as a fellow sailor but always be crying for a port. Onward! Despair can walk the plank.

Compassion for the Critic

Our journeys are all marked by solitude. When the knights sought the grail they became lost if they followed the footsteps of any of another knight that went before them. So too is it with us all. Always when we set off, it is away from others - whether we like it or not, we are ineluctably unique. This can be a source of both great pride and anxiety, neither of which are any use.

The critic has taken as his job the role of publicly defining his taste. Yet everyone has taste. We cannot help it. We are forever expressing who we are by deciding what we are not. "I just don't care for jazz." "I could live without reality television." Not everyone is paid to express it. The critics are paid because we sometimes find the job of deciding for ourselves exhausting, intimidating, or lonely. And so along comes the critic, and if we have not made up our mind, and he is convincing enough, we will have found ourselves an opinion - his; if we already agreed with him, then we rejoice, both because it is nice to have the company, and because it is satisfying to have our opinions validated authoritatively; and if we disagree with him, then we can rail against him, and in so doing are given a great gift - the opportunity to clarify for ourselves why we believe what we believe.

But for the critic, it cannot be easy to be asked again and again for an opinion. It cannot be easy to resist the temptation to believe your opinion is more valuable than another's; it cannot be easy, given this power, to slip into scolding or mocking. How tempting, given the illusionary power of the critic, to attempt to silence the voices he finds aesthetically displeasing.

And how frightening, perhaps, to wonder if your entire body of work could be disregarded in one simple sentence:

"Well, that's your opinion."

If You Want To Be Free

If you want to be free, do not talk to me about how high the prison walls are. Do no talk to me about how cruel and strong the jailer is. If you want to be free, do not tell me how long you have been in jail, or how many others are in jail. If you want to be free, do not complain about the bad food in the jail, or the small cell, or how no man could be expected to live like this.

If you want to be free, do not wait for a pardon. Do not wait for the jail to burn down. If you want to be free, do not tell me about all the escapes that have gone awry. Do not tell me how dangerous the road outside the jail is. If you want to be free, do not tell me how many others are in jail. Do not tell me how the system is fixed, how no one catches a break, how you either get lucky or you don't.

And if you want to be free, do not tell me how lonely your freedom might be. Do no tell me how no one will want you once you are over the wall. If you want to be free, do not cry for yourself in the night. Do not form friendships around misery, clubs of opposition.

If you want to be free, if that's what you want, walk out of the jail. The jailer does not hold the key. The walls are not high. If you want to be free, walk out. There is no key. The jailer is only there to convince you the cell is locked. He is very good at it, and you have been a willing listener. If you want to be free, the door has always been open.

Walk out along the road you choose. If you want company, walk out in broad daylight, through the yard, below every window. Then, perhaps, others will follow. Do not worry about the jailor. Do not hate him either. If you leave and others follow, one after the other after the other, the tide will soon push all the rest out, and then the jailer will find himself alone, and then he too must follow, or be left behind.

The Allure of Despair

The root of all despair is false certainty. It is very tempting, in the course of your journey, to cast about for hard evidence that you are headed in the right direction and that soon all will be well. You will ask a friend or teacher how you are doing, you will compare what you have done to what others you admire have done, you will view some recent success as clear sign that future success is guaranteed.

All these choices lead eventually to despair. Just as it is not possible to look in the mirror and know with certainty what any other person will ever think when they look on that same face, so too is it impossible to find in the present some definite, some absolute, documentable proof that what you wish to occur ever will. So as you look into the waters of the present for proof of the future, the reflecting light and the moving current shows you all the facets of any idea or action, and eventually you choose the worst of all interpretations.

You choose the worst, because THAT is definite. The worst is always the end. The worst is always the apocalypse. So you say, "This work is no good. I'll never be published." Or, "I'm a loser, she'll never love me. No one will ever love me." Whatever the port, you decide it cannot be reached. Thus, the worst always ends the journey, and in so doing ends the uncertainty, which can feel like suffering if it is not embraced.

Do not wait for all to be well. All is well right now, it always has been, it always will be. There is no cosmic fluxuation in the well being of the world or of you. There is only the perception. The world, and you, remain unchanged. So to with your work. Ask only, "Is it what I wanted to say?" If the answer is yes, you are done. If it is no, then there is more work yet to do. That is all. No more, no less. All is well.

And always remember that no step can ever be taken without some faith. You can declare it all over, the end of the world, and yet, barring suicide, you must still wake up the next day and face uncertainty again. Life calls out to you with every wish, every thought, every dream to move forward without knowledge and with an open and hopeful heart.

Skill

Facility with your craft is necessary to cut to the core of what you want to express. But avoid the temptation, once you have developed sufficient mastery over your technique, to lean on your best tricks. If you do enough back-flips, people might laugh or applaud just as they would at any gymnast or juggler, but the tricks alone won't lead to transformation.

In the end, the technician is about himself. The audiences' admiration becomes, instead of transformative, merely a surrogate for what they would hope for themselves - that they need only become skilled enough at something, and they too could wear the mantle of Greatness.

Art, however, is beyond technique. It invites the reader, the listener, the viewer, into the experience, leaves room for him to invest his own imagination into the image, and in this way the art becomes not just the artist's but the audience's as well. The art does not belong to the artist or the audience completely, but is shared. The technique is the messenger, not the message.

It can be difficult to remember this. Applause is nice, and in a pinch, if you're deft enough, you can always pull a nice triple axel to distract the reader. Be generous. Your ego is here not to draw attention to you, but to allow you the courage to speak in your own way for God. Everyone has that right, but some of us have sought a bigger stage on which to do it.

Bill

You Superstar

Here is a favorite quote of mine from John Lennon:

Who on earth do you think you are?
A superstar?
While right you are!

Everyone is a hero. A hero journeys into the unknown and returns a changed person with a precious gift. So can we all. This journey, whether alone at your desk with your work, across an ocean, or into a marriage, is always the same journey, the journey into your soul.

I cannot tell you who you will meet on your journey, but I can assure that others will tell you not to go, that it might be too dangerous. You say to them, if I do not go, who will? Or you will be told that you should go later, when you are better prepared. You say to them, I cannot prepare for what I cannot see, and no lens will ever be able to show me clearly where I am headed. Or they might say simply, you will fail. And you say to them, I will only fail if I turn back. Either way, it is my choice.

But understand that all the doubters and naysayers are all heroes themselves, asking, in their own ways, if they should start on their journeys. Meet them with love. They are waiting at the door to see if the road is safe. You head off on it. They will not get to see you reach your port, they will not know which paths you took, but they will have seen you leave, and perhaps that will be enough for them to think that they could leave too.

Bill

Getting Published

This remains an unfortunate Holy Grail of all writers. I am here to tell you, it may not be what you think it is.

First of all, I encourage you to publish everything and anything you are ready to share with others. Being read is part and parcel with the drive to write. Whether we call ourselves writers or not, we all want to share what we have seen, for only we have seen it. No one in the history of the planet before you has ever lived exactly what you have lived. If you do not say what it is you have seen, who then will? You are the light through which Life shines, so it is up to you whether to pull the shade or throw open the curtains. So yes, publish. Publish, publish, publish. There is plenty of room for everyone.

But as you head out in that boat, do not be fooled into believing that whatever success or lack thereof with which you are met is somehow a concrete reflection of the value or what we often call the quality of the work. Rather, it is entirely a reflection of your belief in the work. I believe anything can be published if the writer believes in it completely and wholeheartedly, whether what has been written is The Waste Land or the next Harlequin Romance. The commercial success of a creation, therefore, lies entirely with its creator.

If this sounds Pollyanna, I ask you this: What is the harm in believing it is so? What good will come of believing a work will only be bought if it has met some external criteria of "good?" Who has set these criteria? Or what good could will come of believing that publication is some kind of capricious lottery, or that only a lucky few born with a predetermined quantity of Talent will ever be greeted with the open arms of editors and readers. If you are drawn to write, then you are meant to write, and it is only then up to you to write without fear and with as much honesty and compassion as possible. Just as there is a lover for every man or woman who wants one, there is a reader for every writer. What is the use in believing otherwise?

I will write more on this later.

Bill

Faith

I didn't always think so, but I understand now that writing is about faith.

Faith can be a fairly loaded word if you are not an overly religious person. To me, faith is simply the willingness to proceed without evidence. In truth, there is barely any other way to proceed. The future is opaque, and was meant to be so. When you begin your day's writing, just as when you set off on any journey, you do not know what snares and pits and fortunes await you. You go because you believe it is worth going, and, hopefully, you have faith that you can get where you need to go.

The only question you must ask of any work is, "Is that what I want to say?" Don't wonder if it is what you SHOULD have said, if such-and-such Great Writer would have said it better, or if what you have to say is for some arcane reason Unpublishable. Only ask if it is what you wanted to say. Have faith that if you wanted to say it, then it is worth saying, and that only you know how best to say it.

No one else in the world knows what it is you must say, or how you must say it. I certainly don't. Agents and editors and teachers and friends and fathers and mothers might tell you otherwise, might fill your head with advice and directions and dos and don'ts, and some of the advice will be sound, will be based on years of experience and much wisdom and hard life lessons learned, but the truth remains none of them knows what it is you must say and how you must say it. Only you. You are alone. And so your only companion on this journey, in the end, is yourself and faith.

And me. I will be there with you too.

So go on, now. I'm sure you can make it.

Bill