Mary Panttaja

In 2001, for various reasons, some personal and some business, all of my ongoing plans and activities were interrupted, seemingly all at once: a business evaporated, a family member died, a baby was born. This is not to say that life all fell apart for me. It did not, for my immediate family was fine and healthy, my home still stood, my health and capacity to work remained. But the things that were driving my activities all fell away and it became clear that I was going to need to make new choices.

At a moment like this, it is very easy to reach out and grab one of our habitual responses—and sometimes that is helpful. But sometimes, if one can surrender to the stillness, manage to be unreactive and feel the flow of life’s direction, such a moment can allow us to align with a truer direction.

In this time of disruption, threads began to come to me. In the joy and exhaustion of the new life of my niece, a children’s illustrated book came into being along with drawings, paintings, and illustrations. In a slow meander and pilgramage to the arctic in our truck, the work on the creative process began to speak to me and flow daily onto pages in my notebook. And one night, laughing at the possibilities of making a living with children’s books or creative philosophy, to the cosmos I posed the question of how I was to pay the bills.

I awoke in the morning from a lucid dream, a very, very rare occurance in my life. The dream was a vision of the opening scene of a story, a movie really, rich and detailed, a profound situation, emotionally taut. I did not remember having such a vision before and spent an hour writing it all down as best I could. And this turned out to be the thread that became the novel. And this stream of potential, this gift of a story, has never abated. It is still there and as I work its weft and weave, it continues to flow.

Writing fiction was never, ever a dream of mine. It was never an idea that came into my head. But this story is an updraft for me, an original source. And part of my confidence in it is its ongoing resourcefulness, the depth to which I can plumb it. Notice, that I do not believe that I make any of it up, but that it is present and I am able to pull it in. That is the best way I can describe my relationship to it.

And so, I can find the precise moment when this updraft came into my consciousness, when everything aligned and I was still enough to see life present it to me, when I was open to new possibilities, even, I would say, searching for my path, but without any particular ideas of what it would be.

And this is not to say that this book is necessarily good, or that it will be successful (though those things are possible in the future). In the arising world there are creative endeavors to be engaged in and learned from regardless of any measure of success that we might have for them. Businesses that falter, writers who still need to grow, philosophies that never quite take wing, these are the ways that the universe evolves. Capacity and skill are continuing to grow. One of the things we know from the creative philosophy is that concern for the state of the outcome is a disabling relationship to the creative process. The creative process must be free of constraints—including the one that says it must be successful. And, as it turns out, that is the best way to improve the odds of being sucessful in the creative process. If you know the result, then you are not creating anything new.

So sometimes we meditate ourselves into an internal quiet; or come to a moment when we struggle to pay attention; or sometimes life crushes our busy-ness into stillness. However we get there, in that momentary reprieve from doingness, sometimes we catch an updraft.