FINDING THE FLOW...

POET'S PASSAGE Home Page

As I found structure to my process through enacting a way of dealing with Time, I discovered openings to old, abandoned passages of creative energy. It was a little like finding an old site on the Internet that I had forgotten about: POET'S PASSAGE. This is similar to other websites I created early in the days of the Internet as we entered a new century. It was designed so that  "travelers" would find their own paths by clicking on moving objects entering and leaving the site. I remember another based on Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I couldn't find it, even though it might exist somewhere in cyberspace. And I think there was another site for a small group of students in IMPACT, who happened to be in my mentoring group on text and texting, but several computer crashes and disastrous data transfers have obliterated the location of this site that was secretly posted during one summer of IMPACT around 2014. Years passed, and I forgot these experiments. Stumbling on this old, unvisited site, reminded me of past noticings that found articulation in some past fabrication that was squirreled away in the labyrinth of time.

As I faced the dilemma of this Pandemic 2020 Lockdown, I was shackled by the debris of unfinished projects and creative ideas that had receded into the realm of the forgotten.  A number of elements had a numbing effect on my perspective:  the spontaneity of the past, and the immediacy of the moment were now tattered remnants of consciousness. My conscious awareness pursued expansion through the act of noticing. Our personal NOTICING is the singular dimension that we bring to the world through what we see, touch, feel, think and experience. Sharing our noticing contributes to the quality and quantity of the reality of the world. We share by creating. In the labyrinth of time we posit our awareness of our noticing.

Thus, we are all poets of the world's reality.  My personal experience is etched in the permanence of reality when I create a poem to disclose my singular noticing of a moment walking in a New England forest:

Sunlight, breaking through the leaves,

Spikes brilliant shafts into the ground,

Shimmering, transparent spires

Of some invisible kingdom.

Silence slips through the trees

Masquerading as the wind;

Imitating eloquent Eternity,

The shade, riddled by the light,

Accommodates a galaxy,

Enduring one silent moment

Some brief, forgotten day.

The COVID-19 crisis awakened within me an inner impasse of spiritual struggle. So many things, so many works, so many opportunities had vanished in the wake of my own inertia. This personal blockage had begun early on, well before the crisis of the Pandemic. In fact, my colleague's March visit for a project in Lived Experience as Research, was an attempt to revive creative energies that at one time seemed inexhaustible. Connecting with the Flow, seemed elusive, blocked by impediments of bewilderment and detachment.

I remember when I was about five-years old, sitting in the hallway, secretly listening to my sister, who was nine years older than me, as she played through works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in an impressive display of mastery and understanding. Later, when no one was around, I would find my way to the keyboard to improvise in the moment. I couldn't read music, but I felt the flow of music that emerged as sound from my fingers on the keys. From that time on, I could improvise endlessly, but also had a gift for remembering those improvisations.

Flow was brought to our attention through the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1996, as an optimal psychological state emerging when deeply engrossed in an challenging activity  through immersion as concentrated focus on a task. This was something I was experiencing in 1941.

I bring attention to this, because today as I listened to a Rachmaninoff piece: Moments Musicaux Op.16 No.3., I went to the piano and improvised. Rachmoninoff's work had a special quality of a dissonant suspension which resolved upward, and inspired by that, I improvised a prelude based on a song I had composed a few years ago, but never wrote down.  It had that same kind of suspension with upward resolution.

Within the crisis of this pandemic, I open to new awareness, to a new sense of Flow where the moment connects with energies I thought were lost. I pick up the loose ends of projects abandoned from fears instilled that it is too late for me... the stories vacated... the lyrics of librettos and plays forsaken... I feel them flowing in a moment of marvelous mingling of miracles.