Once upon a time, a long time ago in 1972, nine young 20-somethings packed up our vans
and station wagons for a road trip across the Canadian border and deep into British Columbia.
We landed at the Red Coach Inn in the town of 100 Milehouse, ready for a one-week seminar
in the art of living.
As a 22-year-old University of Washington student in the early 1970s, I didn't know
what I didn't know about the art of living.
What I learned that week would last a lifetime.
We 30 or 40 some odd folks met every day in an old log chapel and sank into a collective
interior space that sustains me to this day.
According to my notes, it was Michael Cecil, who first told us, or I mean me, about the
creative cycle.
He said there were four metaphoric steps, water, air, earth, fire, water, he said, because
first beginnings bubble up from the deep aquifer of nowhere to now here.
I must be quiet and still then, like the touch points of a calligrapher's pen.
Air because the spirit, my spirit, the great spirit, the breath of inspiration moves upon
the face of the water.
Half the creative cycle is over and all I've done is dive deep.
I sit and wait and take notes and dream.
But the dry land appears in the earth cycle and then I build like crazy and bring the
project into form.
Then the moment of release and exaltation that is fire and it is a time of burning bright
when the project is released to the world.
Of course, I learned the hard way.
If I start a project and abort it, the cycle still plays itself out and negotiating the
backwash is its own challenge for the surfer of life's big waves.
Sometimes the impact of a lesson is in the charm of the moment.
Sometimes because I've taken the time apart to think, learn, change.
Those many hours in the log chapel shape the very fabric of my life to come.
I made friends for a lifetime.
I learned how to navigate the powerful cycles of my own creativity and I found language
from my intuitions, my dreams, my reflections.
That week shimmers in my memory and I return to it in my heart and mind over and over.
In my life it is like a spring-fed brook unchanged by seasons.
