Among the many outlets in which I have taken refuge over these past several months is the podcast MEDITATIVE STORY which combines rich personal tales in the foreground with lush soundscapes in the back. Tucked in among the storytelling are one or two meditation prompts. As the podcast's personally narrated stories unfold, they extend to the listener a swift unwind, taking you right back to being read to as a child. Cannot recommend it enough!

In a recent episode, entitled A Cowboy's Rule for Listening, the poet Waddie Mitchell speaks straight from the heart of growing up on his father’s ranch in Elko, Nevada. We hear how as a young boy he watches the cowboys around him (or buckaroos) with awe, silently absorbing their stories and manners. From that deep listening he masters how to shoe a horse, start a colt, lead a crew and tell a tale. Through the buckaroos he learns that adventure and freedom aren’t things to seek elsewhere.

Throughout Waddie's storytelling he makes sacred the act of listening, impressing it as a privilege to be enjoyed. His mastery of taking slow, deep notice clearly have everything to do with his power of story and its telling. As he crafts his account, he is absolutely in and of himself, not any other person. Without consideration or distraction of extraneous factors, he is right there - in the raw materials of his life. 

As I took in Waddie Mitchell's quiet imagery of the sounds and smells and routines of his rather ordinary ranch life. I was reminded of the goods we have right here before us in every moment and how in seizing that bounty we make the pictures and the poems that only we can make. His story didn't capture my attention with glamor and intricate language, but rather by a poetry that he was able to patch together in the simple act of planting himself fully and sharing that experience's unfiltered essence.

I get to listen...

Creatively, we plot and we study and we calculate... and, these efforts at times do have their merits. But what if we just got back to listening and observing, and learning that way? Isn't it true that, time and time again, when we pause all of the striving and just come back home to ourselves, observing the nature of things as they are, that's when the real magic happens?

Gift yourself a 20 minute exhale and enjoy (freely) Waddie Mitchell's Meditative Story through this link...

"What would you think if I sang out of tune," asked Ringo back in the day. He wondered if his audience would "stand up and walk out on him"? Behind his query is the riddle whose solve continues to elude so many of us who set out to express ourselves creatively. Adoration and perfection... hindrances which drain much of the magic from the beauty we might express. How might we make them less mighty?
 

My experience has been that there's a powerful creative reset at hand in the ongoing act of reconnecting to those motivations for taking our voice to the microphone, the pastels to the textured surface... our eye to the viewfinder. I do so periodically by unplugging and drilling down, truthfully on WHY it is that I make these images. WHY it is that I take a pen to the page to set these pictures to poetic verse? It's an exercise rich in return and an opportunity to both recall and re-order my purposes. In getting quiet with this question of WHY, my list generally resembles something like this...
 

1. Because only I can see some thing in a certain light
2. To practice and learn and stretch my mind... to grow as an artist
3. To mute the external noise, exhale and get present
4. To make a record that a certain person, place, thing or moment happened... and to tease out its extraordinary
5. To, perhaps, one day share it with another?

If approached (care)freely, a list as this should build (and order) itself fairly effortlessly. Such an account will be (and should be) unique, for each of us. However, motivations such as my Number 5, will to some degree likely be a given for all. It's a reality not to be excluded, but rather dimmed. Despite our best attempts, forever there simmers some concern for how others may react and receive our imperfect artistic expression. The question becomes, how much weight do we allow it to seize? Regular visits to such probes present golden opportunities for reclaiming our motivation and shifting back to truth as the driving factor in our creative process.
 

When I downgrade the "riddle" to the bottom of my list, I cut off a bit of the clench the applause factor holds on the work that I make. In a gesture of pause to consider the hierarchy of my purposes, well before the click of my shutter, often a quiet recalibration happens. Of course ongoing practice is essential in order to build some muscle memory around this recall. And, despite my efforts, many days I find my list going straight out the window as I lunge forward in a fog of outside influences. But some days... some days I remember, and when I do my "verses" are just a bit truer.

Back to the Ringo question... Lucky for us, he sang out his tune, and of course, we know how that plot unfolded!

In the midst of the world's chaos and our collective interior tumult, "good morning", a customary pleasantry, remains in wide release along my daily walks in the rising sun. Especially in these past several months, as I both receive and return the greeting, it triggers for me an internal inquiry... Is it so? If not, don't I have some say to, at the very least, make it so?

"Wherever your mind finds satisfaction...
there is your meditation."


On the days when I am able to get fully present with the concept of "good morning", I make my way to my camera. These courtships, without fail, upgrade the tenor of not only my mornings, but often my afternoons and evenings as well. Among the dividends they pay me personally are breathing lessons. "Wherever your mind finds satisfaction... there is your meditation," writes Lorin Roche on page 260 of his wonderful collection, The Radiance Sutras. His observation removes the formula factor, allowing the practice of meditation to become more free range. Meditation can be a swift elevation to everyone's hours, and its construct looks different for each of us. Getting creative for some moments is the shape it takes for me. 

The other teaching I find this "good morning" embodiment imparts is the essential reminder of how much I still do not know. “The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails," wrote the author T.H. White. Out communing with the natural world is where I take my teachings. "Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” Wonder + Breathing = A little CHEER.


To the countless sidewalk strangers whose paths I cross on my morning walks, I say "thank you" for helping to make "good morning" my mantra during these times especially. It cues me to go out and find my smile... and recall that plenty, is enough.