LETTERS FROM HOME: IN A FIELD BEYOND IDEAS OF RIGHT AND WRONG

Jan. 2, 1997

Dear Leslie,

It's warm for January and has been foggy. The mists remind me of Northern California, where they bathe the redwood trees in almost perpetual moisture in the winter, making it possible for such gargantuan, old life form to exist. To walk through a redwood grove in winter is to feel the exchange that occurs between sky and land, to see sparkling particles of one life force adrift on billows of another.

Here in Missouri, the phenomenon usually is not so luminous. Much can be taken for granted, reduced to a daily weather forecast, the TV weatherman's admonition to "Take along an umbrella." The stuffing comes out of life when it is represented as an event to protect yourself against. Alternative weather report: Looks like a splashy day.

I wonder, do you shop for books like I sometimes do, walking the aisles until a color, an image, a word, a title, an author's name stops you. Then reading the first paragraph and listening for the sound of anything falling into place. If so I buy, but often don't read right away. Maybe not for months. It's as if the book is ready but I'm not. It'll be on the bedside table when that changes.

My friend David gave me a collection of Rumi's poetry last week. I love his writing but didn't begin the book. I felt like reading a book I'd intuitively bought a few weeks earlier. The book on opening began with words by Rumi: "Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing/there is a field./I'll meet you there."

The premise of "Life, Paint and Passion: Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous Expression" is that those of us who cannot think of ourselves as artists in the painterly sense of the word did create art once upon a time. When we were children, before we accepted a teacher's or our culture's ideas about the right way or the wrong way for a tree to look. Before we learned to judge ourselves.

I've been reading books about creativity lately and have come to some conclusions of my own.

Principally, that creativity is no more and no less than connection with our own source, the part of ourselves that does not concern itself with what other people will think, that part that KNOWS and is unafraid to tell, the part that feels everything and is unafraid to reveal.

Creativity is not "Moby Dick." Creativity is Moby Dick.

In Big Sur, there was a place anybody could go to paint. It was a small building that housed a table piled with paints and brushes and paper. The walls were covered with paintings.

A few coins could be left in the box to cover the cost of materials. The only admonition was to approach painting as a kindergartner would -- eagerly, fearlessly, playfully.

To play is to be deeply creative, the teacher said.

The painting isn't done until you say it is, she also said. She pointed to one, a compilation of small sheets of paper that stretched all the way down one wall and onto another. The artist had been working on that painting for years.

In a sense, we're all working on a self-portrait 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years in the making. All of us are unfinished.

You can paint by the numbers or create something the world has never seen before.

You already are something the world has never seen before. The ultimate creative act is to trust that that's enough.

"Forget safety./Live where you fear to live./Destroy your reputation./Be notorious." -- Rumi

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.