I’ve always had a deep sense that presence and creativity are not really luxuries, but an essential part of life. This inner knowing has been confirmed by a great book I’m reading, called, “Deep Survival.” It contains many well- documented tales of survival-in the wilderness, at sea, in prisoner of war camps, and in the twin towers of 9/11.

It turns out that the people who survive are not necessarily the well- trained, experienced ones. The survivors are the ones who are able to deal with the reality right in front of them in a creative, flexible way. The ones who die are holding on to a map inside their minds. They have an idea of what is happening, and the idea stands between them and the truth of what is actually going on. They cannot meet the moment, the situation as it is, and respond to it.

So the more we live life according to our maps, our ideas, the less we are able to be present to our immediate, direct experience. And the more we can respond creatively, flexibly, to the demands of the moment, the more likely it is that we will walk out of the situation alive.

The state of presence, and our capacity to live creatively are essential survival skills. And they are not something we can just pull out of the bag, next time we get into trouble.

It was clear, reading ‘Deep Survival,’ that survivors carry these resources deep in their being. Their ability to be truly present, to let go of their mind maps, was a direct result of the way they had lived their lives. The ones who fought with reality, complained, resisted and denied what was going on, simply did not live to tell the story.

It’s random acts of kindness week in B.C. A small group of children started the week off a few years ago in their neighborhood, and the project took on a life of it’s own, like a stream that could not be contained within its banks.

I’ve asked a lot of people about their experiences with ‘unsolicited kindness.’ Everyone has experienced this mysterious force. There are stories that fall on your heart like sweet rain. Can you imagine if we heard such tales every day on the news?

Here’s mine:
A few years ago I was leaving a week- long meditation retreat. I was with a friend, and we didn’t know the area very well, or how to get to the main highway from where we were. We were still very deep in some meditative state. I was driving, and it wasn’t feeling so easy, even to drive round this quiet neighborhood.  We got thoroughly lost in about 10 minutes.

I stopped at a mall. There were a few cars and people around. I looked way across the parking lot and saw a guy standing beside his blue truck. Somehow I knew that he was the one.

I walked over, told him we were lost, and asked him for directions. He was very kind, and repeated them a few times for me, while I wrote them down. I could see him looking at me, picking right up on the state I was in.

I walked back to my car, and he waved and wished me luck. He was going home, back in the other direction. I got back in the car with my friend and we drove off. This time, due to the totally altered state we were both in, it only took us five minutes to get lost again. But now we were right in the middle of heavy traffic, and it was not going to be easy to stop. I could feel myself starting to panic. I looked out the window, and there was my guy who had given us the directions, right behind us in his blue truck-honking and waving us into the next lane, where we would turn right. I realized that he had turned around and followed me, knowing that I was not really capable of following his directions.

I turned right and started to get my bearings. I leaned out the window and shouted to him, “Thank you, I’m okay now-go back home!”

“No way,” he shouted back at me, “I’m staying with you till you get to the bridge.”

And he did. It was a good ten minute ride, and he stuck with us the whole way, until we turned onto the bridge and waved him goodbye.

Perhaps it was because of the state I was in that day, but I never really got over it. This ordinary looking guy in blue jeans with his pick up truck had a heart as big as the moon. He had absolutely nothing to gain by taking care of us like that. I’ll never see him again, and I don’t know his name. But he lives on, inside me.

Behind my T.V.
in the bedroom,
are four pots of geraniums,
sleeping through the winter.

Three are pale green,
one has no leaves
at all.

I water them
once in a while,
just enough
to keep them alive
until spring.

I love
that they bloom there
in secret,
behind the T.V.
where nobody sees them
but me.

I wonder about
the quiet plant,
the leafless one.

Will it come
alive again,
under blue sky
and warm rain?

I feel curious about
the secret movement
of life.

Life that sprouts
in silence,
hidden away,
forgotten,
but not dead.

A seed can sit
for a long time,
before it awakens.

Some seeds only sprout
when fire
comes upon them.

What seeds
do we carry,
that wait for fire
to ignite them?

The Acceptance of Difficulty

A couple of comments:  re “humans addicted to struggle”.  I also feel that we in the western world are addicted to all things going our way, that we should always be happy, be fulfilled--if not we often try to escape, resort to alcohol or take a pill. 

I’ve had a big learning in this area and have come to accept that parts of life are difficult (what we take on as alive human beings). The acceptance of difficulty, defeat and pain in our lives plus the awareness that we have a choice- either to indulge in the negativity or to let go, accept and be proactive and realize that this too shall pass seems to eliminate the struggle aspect.  Perhaps this is when sweet vulnerability comes in.  I love your imagery of babes in water...no struggle, no splashing around, just perfect balance in their environment.

Marilyn McCombe, Nelson, B.C. Canada

If you really want to get a feeling for how someone lives, look at the way they relate to time. Time is like a river we are all floating in. It surrounds us, encloses us, until we cannot even imagine a different way of being with it. But there is. I am lucky enough to live beside a two year old girl called Ruby. She has taught me a lot about time, gifts I was not ready to receive when my own daughter was that age.

One night a few weeks ago, Ruby’s mother and I were out shoveling snow at about 6 o’clock, while Ruby played in the piles we were making. We shoveled away for about 40 minutes. I was conscious of dinner waiting for me inside, and the night growing darker and quieter. Just as we were finishing and getting ready to go inside, Ruby jumped up and announced with great energy and glee, “It’s time for a walk!”

“Now?” we asked her, looking around at the soft snowy night. “Yes, now!’ she said, “offering a hand to her mother, “Let’s go!” Her mother, who is quite extraordinary, laughed, took her hand, and walked down the road with her, into the night. I went back inside, according to my schedule. But the moment continued to haunt me. My heart recognized a lost opportunity.

Whenever I’m with Ruby, I remember when I was young, and my mother would wake me in the morning for school. I never wanted to get up.  I would do this thing I called ‘slipping inside the moment.’ As I lay in bed, I would let myself fall inside each moment, until it stretched out, became elastic, and seemed to last far longer than what the clock was telling me.

During the last few years that I have been coaching, there is one thing that more of my clients have expressed than any other. And that is a great longing to be free of the tyranny of time. Some of them speak about the place of ‘just being’ or ‘being in the flow,’ and how that slips away and disappears when the day’s activities take over. One client of mine spoke last week about ‘that Sunday feeling,’ when there is nothing structured or planned-just a wide open space before you, ‘where you don’t have to be anybody.’ She said that was more important to her than anything.

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In this blog I want to emphasize that the heart of the creative process involves a kind of deep unlearning. What does this mean? It means that we have to be willing to question the way that we think, the way that we observe, the way we take all sorts of things for granted. We need to get back to our ‘pre-conventional’ mind, the awareness within us that sees the world freshly, for the first time, with curiosity and wonder.

You can look out your window, and call what you see ‘a tree.’ But it’s actually so much more than that tiny little sound ‘tree.’ What is your actual experience of that tree, that person, that moment, when you let go of the words, the ideas, and just open up to it with your whole being?

If we drop back into the openness, the silence, the deep receptivity of our unconditioned awareness, we contact something very alive and true. When we write from that place, then our words have a vibrancy and power to them that wakes us up and invites us to be right here, in this moment, without our judgments, opinions and beliefs. That’s what it means to be naked.

For more information and inspiration on this topic, please visit my website at http://www.barefootjourneys.net

with love
Shayla