Stoking the Creative Fires. Phil Cousineau

those words “out for a walk,” as Paul Klee said about drawing. Write about them without thinking, as fast as you can, for two minutes. Surprise yourself.

      Fold the paper or card and carry it with you for the rest of the day. Let the words lead you away into the land of reverie.

      Do this every day until it's a habit.

       FROM REVERIE TO CREATIVITY

      When Navajo sculptor Nora Naranjo-Morse wants to make her beautiful clay vessels, she drives out to a riverbed her mother showed her when she was a child. “When I come here I'm excited, I'm like a child,” she says in Michael Apted's brilliant documentary film, Inspirations.

      Nothing can hurt me. No one is going to say anything mean to me here. Everything is so peaceful, and beautiful, and perfect, so I just open up. That's exactly what we're supposed to do; that's exactly what I'm looking for when I'm going to create, that I'm opening up. I'm opening up to this force that I'm not afraid of and that I can just let myself fall into and be inspired. I think about the people I love, and think about the things around me so that when I go back to my home and my studio I carry this with me and I'm able to create and open up again and let it all flow into those vessels I'm making.

      For Nora and many other indigenous people I've known, the “where” in question doesn't refer to a physical place as much as metaphysical one. Their focus and reverence is on the heightening of spiritual sensibilities, the celebration of the Great Mystery.

      “It's all about reverie,” says Gregg Chadwick, a visionary oil painter from Southern California. He told me in a recent conversation that, “I need some kind of flight if I'm going to create on the canvas what I see in my head. To get that effect, I need to capture a kind of timelessness and leave the mystery of the world between memory and dream intact.”

      Over the last decade, Chadwick's work has been inspired by his years crisscrossing Southeast Asia as the son of a career military officer. There, his eyes were opened to the intersecting paths of art, music, literature, and religion. His paintings of Buddhist monks and temples and the accelerating pace of life explore the ephemeral aspects of reality. His most profound challenge is offering his viewers an opportunity to be as transported as he is when he paints. “I have to get into a special mood to create the art and not just product. So I'm very careful about the music I play, what's hanging on the walls of my studio, the books stacked in the corner, what I've been eating that morning, even conversations with my son.” His work springs from a fierce soul-struggle, living proof that, if you want to be original, you have to learn to trust your reveries, your voice, your vision, and resist the temptation of style and fashion. Otherwise you'll never, as Bob Marley sang so thrillingly, “Satisfy your soul.”

      “What if,” Coleridge wondered, “in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you woke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah! What then?” In the spring of 2002, P. J. Curtis, a Dublin DJ and music producer, told me a strange story in an old country pub in County Clare. His aunt had so many dreams in which she heard “fairy music” that she took to keeping a pencil tied to her bedpost so she could write down the music in the middle of the night. By the time she died, the wallpaper in her bedroom was festooned with musical notation from her dreams, some of which was eventually recorded by famed Irish groups like the Chieftains and the Dubliners.

      Amazing grace, we might say. But the rational mind cries out: What's happening here? In Lifetide, biologist Lyall Watson attempts an explanation: “Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake did it visually, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Joyce managed it with words. They succeeded in diverting the stream of consciousness in ways that allowed dream imagery to survive in the harsh light of day . . . We do it every time we daydream.”

      The trick is to make the dream come alive. To do that, we have to “make something out of it.” We don't truly know ourselves until we put our experiences into words or images with love and abandon.

      EXERCISE 2. Six Ways to Dream with Your Eyes Open

      Write down a morning dream. Keep it alive all day. Think about it at breakfast, in the car, at the café, until it inspires a response. Now make something out of it, a song, a poem, a story, a weaving, a mosaic.

      Go to an art museum. Pick one painting. Look at it until you see it. Walk around inside it. Lose yourself in it. Imagine you're the artist. Re-create it in your mind so you can always conjure it when in need of inspiration.

      Spring open a long-locked trunk. Strong smells and old possessions transport us; they catalyze memory and summon the muses. Let them trigger a story.

      Focus and relax. William Wordsworth's secret trick for inspiring himself was concentrating on one thing, then turning away with what he called “soft eyes,” relaxing, until whatever he saw became beautiful.

      Spend a day blindfolded. Martial arts legend Bruce Lee practiced his hardest moves with a bandana over his eyes until he could see, he said, with his inner eyes.

      Read to children. It sets their hearts on fire and rekindles your own. Remember that The Hobbit sprang out of a single line from J.R.R. Tolkien's “Winter Reads,” his improvised stories to his own kids. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit . . .”

       WHAT THEN SHALL WE DO?

      For R. B. Morris, a prolific singer, songwriter, and playwright from Knoxville, Tennessee, reverie is a subtle but powerful trigger. Recently he explained why:

      It's the starting point for me, the threshold of creativity. It's the moment where all your other mental and physical functions fold into “dreamy thinking or imagining,” as Webster's says, “fanciful musing, a visionary notion.” If we really want to cultivate our creativity, we simply need to schedule our lives around the production of reverie. Frankly, I have to declare myself severely undisciplined in matters of creativity, but I do try to move toward those times of day when reverie comes easiest, such as the hours of waking or before sleep. The mind seems more willing then to throw off the harness of the world and allow the otherworldly to emerge. Of course, then one has to cultivate one's own process of observing and taking notes. Still, for all one's cultivation, the muse has a tendency to come and go as she pleases. So it's best to keep pen and paper at hand, even if I'm driving my pickup up on the mountain, and be ready to roll with the reverie whenever it occurs.

      You know that a deep chord has been struck in you when a story, an image, a color, a drawn line, a melody taunts you until you figure out why you've been so deeply shaken. Australian director Peter Weir's film, The Year of Living Dangerously, did just that to me when it was released over twenty years ago. Rarely a day goes by that I don't hear the voice of actress Linda Hunt, playing a male stringer for a Malaysian newspaper at the time of Sukarno's overthrow, asking plaintively: “What then must we do?” She asks this at the crisis point when she takes a stand for all she believes in, even at the risk of her life. She asks it again and again in a fierce voiceover as her fingers fly across her typewriter keys. The challenging question is taken from Tolstoy's Confession, a searing account of his mid-life spiritual crisis when he saw “nothing ahead except ruin.” The answer came to him in a voice: “See that you remember.” Then he woke up.

      With the whole world coming at us like a great thrashing wave, how do we recognize and remember reverie, especially when technology is now doing so much of the recall for us? There's only one trick I know of and it's not really a ruse. Write it down. Beat poet Gary Snyder once told me: “The only difference between writers and everybody else is that we always keep a thirty-nine cent notebook in our pockets. You never know when the inspiration might hit.” Many years later, I was startled to hear, in a radio interview with author Anne Rice, that she relied so heavily on daydreams that, for her, writing is daydreaming, which sometimes provides coded messages, including entire