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Will you walk with me?

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aloha_75 - Walk with me

In yesterday’s post on The Wild Hunt I talked about Awen and about my creative process. It wasn’t standard fare for that site, and not the most widely read and shared post that I’ve written, but it was a very natural thing for me to write about.

A song is little more than a conversation between the songwriter and the listener. The more honest the songwriter can be about her truth, the more deeply the words will connect with the listener. A song can be a testimonial, a sermon, a proclamation, a confession, or a plea, but a song is never a monologue. There is always the listener, and though the listener may not be able to communicate directly with the songwriter she is processing what she hears; translating it, transmuting it, absorbing it, becoming it or rejecting it. As the songwriter has undergone a personal transformation in the process of writing the song, so, too, will the listener undergo a similar process when she hears the final work. The more raw the former, the more impactful the latter.

I write songs. It’s my gig. For about 1/3 of every month I’m in Los Angeles writing, doing work in the ever-evolving Music Industry, and I really enjoy it.

When I started this blog I was of the mindset that there needed to be a separate space for me to do my spiritual work. I couldn’t allow overlap with the promotional work I was doing around the release of my album. That could get messy. Too many people were invested in the success of the project for me to put that in jeopardy by being transparent, I though. But what I’m coming to discover is that there is really is no way to avoid overlap.

You don’t have your “spiritual life” in a vacuum. You are all of the things that you are, pretty much all the time.

At least, that’s my experience.

For me, my creative process opens up spiritual understanding. And many times my spiritual explorations lead to creative inspiration. It’s interesting to me that I was so desperate to compartmentalize my life when I started this blog considering that many of my songs are directly influenced by different periods of my religious life. You can’t extract my spirituality from my music. Just ain’t gunna happen.

So why keep the music apart from my spiritual work?

That’s a question I’m asking myself as I think about the future of Bishop in the Grove.

Over the past few months my life has been reshaped in very interesting ways. I’m no longer affiliated with any particular tradition, although I am opening myself up to the Bardic Grade studies of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD). I’m living in a new city, meeting new people, and finding that just around every corner of this luscious, green place there is some perfectly ordinary, yet totally pagan joy to be experienced. I mean, there is street-side composting here! People know where their food comes from (see Portlandia episode 1 for proof). It’s almost as though this entire town is kind of pagan in practice, even if it isn’t Pagan in identity.

So there’s all of this newness in my life, which includes a newfound sense of presence in my creative work. When I go to LA to write I feel like I am doing exactly what I should be doing with my life. My writing feels certain. Solid. I feel in total alignment as a person when I’m in that creative space, and I won’t accept that that sense of alignment isn’t also connected to my Druidry.

It was the emphasis on creativity that first led me to OBOD. They start you on the Druid path by encouraging you to invest more in your creativity; to find the Awen and come to better know how it can move though your life; to help you become a bard.

And if there was anything I think I was made for, it’s that. I mean, I am already a bard, in a modern sense. This is what I do. This is what I have always done. I’m curious if there’s a way to re-contextualize the songwriting work as “bardic expression”; to sort of reverse-engineer my perspective about the spiritual nature of creativity.

I think this is a good way to move forward. I think this is the direction the Awen is moving, if you will. It moves toward greater integration. It moves toward a deepening of practice by way of investing in the practices that encourage feelings of love and wholeness.

This will be the direction I walk, friends. I hope you will walk with me.

Photo by Sam Howzit

The Awen Moves: An Offering in the Morning

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There is an intrinsic connection between creativity and spirituality, I think. The impuse to create feels very much to me like the impulse to worship, to do ritual, or to pray.

Perhaps this is why my heart sang out so loundly when I first found the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. OBOD asserts that the spirit of creativity and inspiration, the Awen, flows through me and through all things, and by learning to nurture my relationship to the Awen I can develop the foundation for a living, thriving, vibrant spiritual tradition.

I write a lot about religion here on Patheos (understandibly), and I think that in doing so I sometimes forget that it was creativity which first led me to Druidry. To be a Bard, I learned through OBOD, is to be connected to a great, cosmic, creative force, and to be expressive with one’s voice is to be in service to your tribe, your people, your planet. Cultivating creativity allows the Bard to become her own Creator, a maker of enchanting beauty, a living source of inspiration. While I’ve found that the religiosity of ADF Druidism speaks to me, and the voice of the Reconstructionist fascinates me, it continues to be this connection between creativity and spirit that nourishes me.

To sing is to expose the dark richness of the soil (the soul), to turn it over, and expose it to the light. Strip away all of the adorments of our spiritual traditions, remove any of our religious or cultural markers, and we are left with our breath, our song, our creative fire. Stand naked in the forest, breathe in the air of life which permeates this planet, and your voice can become something truly magical.

With that, I make an offering today — a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and a testiment to the power and movement of the Awen — by lifting up my voice in the presence of the living earth, our Great Mother.

Peace be with you on this glorious day.

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Where is the Source of Your Inspiration?

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This morning I woke, picked up the pen and paper on the hotel nightstand, and wrote down these words:

What is it to write from sleeping?

To write without ceasing. To hold back the need to edit, the impulse to correct. The penmanship is awful, but that does not matter. The only impulse is to write. The chance to create from a place of great stillness; the greatest stillness next to eternal sleep.

Write because there is a fire of great color burning in your heart. The heat is your cousin, your lover, your friend. The heat is a birthright, but the heat is disloyal. It vanishes if ignored. It will return, but you must coax it with kindness, and ritual, and sex. You must invite the fire back by making love to the essence of pleasure, pain, fear, and ecstasy.

Call back the fire like a lost child. Scream into the subdivision for your baby. She will come running to you. She will blaze through your manicured lawn and be a beacon of transformation.

Set fire to your heart!

I like the intangible. I try to hold onto it. I like the formless, and I too often try to pin it down. I ask a lot of questions. I always have. I asked about our concept of compassion, and it led to a follow-up piece by fellow Patheos writer, Steven T Abell. I asked questions about the point of our religions, and it led to some of the most amazing comments yet on Bishop in the Grove. These questions I ask of religion and spirituality are useful. Or they can be, at least. The first thought I put to paper this morning was a question: What is it to write from sleeping? I ask questions in order that I might begin to approach an answer. I don’t know the answers, but I can move toward them. This is how my mind works.

I admit that I have experienced the feeling of being sidetracked by my own inquiry. Questions can also be a tool for distraction. They can take the focus away from the doing of my something. In point of fact, after sitting down at my computer today and writing whatever flowed out of my mind for a solid five minutes, I began to deconstruct all of it and try to make it make sense. No longer was I writing; I was thinking about writing. There’s a tremendous difference between those two things…. just ask a Creative Writing major.

I see a parallel here with my practice of religion. I often take myself out of the routine of my spiritual work, whatever that may look like at the time, and start to think about it. Reflection is useful, yes, but dissection can be quite violent. I may pick apart what I’m doing to the point where I’m no longer sure of what’s in front of me. My spirituality looks like a series of disparate paragraphs on the screen, with no cohesion, no order, and certainly no “flow.”

But then there are moments when I exhale, release this obsessive need for understanding, and experience the memory of a time when I did not care much about religion, its purpose, or its relevance. I did not seek out the divisions between us so that I might examine them, or deconstruct them. In that memory-me, I was an imaginative person; a man who was a child who was playful, and who sang melodies that had never been written. I remember the feeling — the location — of that inspiration, and then, all of a sudden, I step into a creative space. My mind is freed up from the inquiry, and something begins to flow through me again.

I like to think of inspiration occurring in a particular “place,” physically and bodily. I try to locate it, or to remember where I’d felt it last, if I feel uninspired. I try to remember where it was inside of me that an idea first showed itself. Was it behind my eyes? In my stomach? Or, did I hold it in my hand? Certainly, our inspirations can come from the physical world. Nature is a generous patron, and we are provided with all that we need to be inspired if we open our eyes wide enough. But, I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about charting a map of your insides, and looking for treasure. I’m talking about inspiration that originates somewhere inside of you, and that even feels like it may have originated from somewhere else altogether.

Have you felt that kind of inspiration?

I ask you – where is the source of your inspiration? Where do you find it? Have you every closed your eyes and been flooded by the imagines of the divine, the sacred, the profane, or the magical? Have you seen, in the stillness of your own being, a clear vision, and then brought that vision into the world?

If you are inclined to answer that you are “not a creative person,” I say hogwash. You are. We all are. We create in every moment of our lives. Put any dismissive thought aside for a moment, cock your head, and listen to the question again, sideways.

Where is the source of your inspiration?

 

I Got Religion During #NaNoWriMo

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For thirty days in a row I shall wake up every morning, brew a batch of French press coffee, sit down at my solid, cluttered desk (or a reasonable substitute) and write at least one thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven words until, on November 30th, I reach the final 50,000 word mark.

You see, I, along with thousands of other professional and amateur writers, am participating in the 2011 NaNoWriMo Writing Challenge. If you have any chutzpah at all you’ll join me. As of the publication of this post you’re only 1 day behind. You could totally catch up.

Is it lunacy? Yes. Undoubtably. But is it pointless? Absolutely not.

Yesterday evening, in response to my first online proclamation of my writing progress (a proud 1712 words), a friend of mine responded by saying,

It’s a trivial matter to write 50,000 words in thirty days. The challenge is to make them worth reading.

This statement is only partly true, and I told him as much. It is a challenge to write words that are worth reading, no matter how many you’re putting down on the page. I won’t deny that. Blogging at Patheos for the past few months has given me a great many opportunity to reflect on the economy and efficacy of my writing, and to seek to do good work in every post. These posts average between 800 and 1000 words, a manageable amount for both writer and reader, but not so many that I lose sight of myself.

But, in longer form work — say, in the writing of a book — the Inner Editor has many more opportunities to barge in and halt the process. The Inner Editor becomes the Inner Critic, picking apart the lines, finding reasons why none of it makes sense. The Inner Critic, left unchecked, can easily become the Inner Hater. Once that happens, you might as well close your laptop and go do the dishes.

There is nothing trivial about writing 50,000 words in 30 days. In thirty days there are dozens upon dozens of moments where one must resist the inclination to doubt one’s self, where one must move forward in spite of her uncertainty, and trust that there will be a time and place to make sense of all the details, and that that time isn’t in between every single line.

I’d liked to suggest that NaNoWriMo is more than just a writing exercise. As a Druid, I will be bold and say that writing 50,000 words in 30 days can and should be understood as a sacred, spiritual rite; a holy ritual deserving much respect and great honor.

(And I ain’t just saying that to get the kudos.)

Respect the Awen. Tame the Hater.

Modern Druids, particularly those of us who trace some part of our spiritual lineage back to the Revivalist moment of the 17th and 18th centuries, place a great value on creativity and the inner creative spirit. We have a word for it, in fact: Awen.

The Awen, which can be translated from Welsh to mean, “inspiration,” is a mysterious force. Any creative person — a writer, a musician, a poet — understands that the true nature of their own creativity is always somewhat illusive to them. One is never solely responsible for their own creations, and we are all subject to “getting in the way of the flow,” if you will.

Awen is the flow. Awen is also the source of the flow. Awen is the experience of being in perfect harmony with your own creative voice. And, Awen is located in between the words and breaths of that creative voice.

Awen is not the correct usage of words. Awen is the expressive, creative, perhaps even chaotic use of words. Change out “words” for “sounds,” “images,” “movements” — it all fits. It all makes sense. Any of those statements will ring true.

Freestyle rappers connect to the Awen. Beat poets, and improvisational comedians connect to the Awen. Every time you’ve ever been caught up in a melody, and it took you to a place that you hadn’t expected, and you find yourself singing a song that no one has ever sung before — that’s you being embraced, enriched, enlivened by the Awen.

Every one of us is given a voice at birth, and every one of us – at some point – forgets how to use it. We are all given messages that we are not worthy to share our opinion, our perspective, our view on the world. We are told that we are stupid, or that we aren’t as good as our siblings, our parents, the celebrities on the television. There are entire factions of culture which exist for the sole purpose of subjugating your voice in order to replace it with the voice of someone else. There is always a wall being built somewhere to damn up the Awen, to block the creative flow from our heart to our head to our mouth to the world.

But for the next 29 days I’ll be breaking down that wall. There will be no room in my body for it. There will be no room on my desk, or on my computer screen, or even in the column of this blog.

No Walls in November.

This month, while I open myself to the creative flow of the Awen, writing will become, for me, a religious act. I will seek the source of my creativity, and through opening myself to it I will redefine worship to mean writing without ceasing. Writing without ceasing, in some ways, is not unlike praying without ceasing. It’s accessible to anyone with the time, commitment and patience, and the rewards are many.

So, join me if you will. Write without ceasing. Connect to the source of your own creativity and challenge yourself in new and unexpected ways. Let the connecting to your own creativity become an extension of your spiritual practice.

Write reverently. Write irreverently.

Write!!!

[And, if you want to spread the word about NaNoWriMo, my writing challenge, or this exploration of how creativity is a sacred aspect of any spiritual tradition, please share this post with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or your social network of choice!]