Starting In Silence

Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom
by Peter Levitt

In Fingerpainting on the Moon, Peter Levitt shows us new ways to create and live from the spiritual source of our lives. "We were born to create," he says. "It's our birthright. Our nature. Remember: Everything is permitted in the imagination!" Based on Peter's more than thirty years as a poet and teacher, this book helps readers to express and rely upon their deepest nature in creative work, whether it is writing, painting, music, or just being alive. "You are both deeply human and deeply Divine," he tells us. "Only practice fingerpainting on the moon and you will discover how true this is."

Creativity of any kind requires risk — the risk of being a beginner, letting go of control, or revealing intimate or even unknown parts of ourselves. It can also be a source of tremendous joy: the joy of giving voice to our deepest needs and imaginings. Taking a gentle and freeing approach to creativity, Peter Levitt shows us the essentially spiritual nature of creative acts and helps us open our hearts and minds so we can express ourselves with courage, innate wisdom, and authenticity.

No special conditions are required to create. We need not wait for inspiration to strike, or worry that it has abandoned us. Developed over decades of work with writers and other artists, the exercises, stories, meditations, and other tools in this book will:

• Connect us with our inherent and inexhaustible creative and spiritual source
• Quiet the inhibitions and doubts that derail our intentions to create
• Build and nurture trust, intuition, spontaneity, clarity, and confidence
• Rekindle our spirit of play to energize our creative efforts

Synthesizing centuries of global wisdom from traditions that include Zen Buddhism, mystical Judaism, Su?sm, Christianity, and Native American beliefs, and offering insights from such masters as Paul Klee, Itzhak Perlman, Allen Ginsberg, and Pablo Neruda, this book will nurture and sustain the artist in each of us, freeing us to generate work that is genuine, vital, and compelling.

When I was very young I would ask my mother to tell me stories about her own childhood. More often than not, I would already be in bed with the lights turned out and the warmth of my mother beside me filling the room. I loved to imagine her life, to hear her say the simple phrases that brought before my eyes the mythic landscape of what came before me. I loved to hear about the trolley car, the ice man, the milk buckets. It made me laugh against all reason to imagine my mother as a young girl shoveling coal, but it frightened me to picture her standing alone in a dark tenement hallway where she washed dishes at the sink that five families shared. Each of the phrases she used called deeply to my imagination and took on the power of a constellation in the sky of my childhood dreams. Milk bucket stood beside ice man. Trolley car was coming to take him home. And I was there, too, with my mother at my side, taking in the nighttime mystery of where I came from and what the world was like before I was born.

One part of this ritual that I most remember was my mother's silence. Before she spoke, she would always sit quietly for a few moments on the edge of my bed. I could hear in the dark the slightest trace of her breathing. There was something special about this, something almost prayerful in the way she returned to her own beginnings and allowed the images she would speak to fill her eyes and imagination. I could feel her do this, and it made the silence in the room feel almost holy. It was a silence filled with a curious kind of yearning. A silence made of memory, of wonder, and because she always told me true stories, it was also a silence made of pain. Life is big, it told me. Very big. This is something you will come to understand. And then she would begin to speak.

People have always sought the story of their beginning. It is a primordial yearning at the root of all creation myths. As individuals and cultures we have been fascinated with the nature of how we and the world came to be. It is a primary source of our expressive arts. Once our intuition finds its way into form, we begin the naming by which we place ourselves among all other things in the world, what native people of the First Nation call all my relations. Our creations provide a sense of order and meaning that assures us and those who see our work that we do not face our lives alone. What I was able to feel in my mother's silence is true. Life is big. It is bigger than we fully understand. This is part of why we seek to hear and tell stories that take us to our source. We yearn for the intimacy of being wrapped in the sacred shawl such stories provide. And no matter what part of the world, or what tradition, the story comes from, we can tell when it is true.

One story of the beginning of the universe that I have always loved comes from mystical Judaic sources. It says that as you stand beneath a midnight sky and gaze into the heavens, each of the countless stars above you and the entire dark fabric of night in this never-ending shimmer dance of black and white before your eyes carries within it a spark of the original Creator. It tells us that at the beginning of creation itself, a lit ember of the Divine was sewn like a stitch into every element that makes up this quilt of night and stars.

As you stand in the presence of this illuminated sky that is at once familiar and mysterious, it is very easy to believe this is so. But the story does not stop there. The tradition holds that this ember, this creative spark of the Divine, is not reserved solely for the marvels seen in the heavens at night — the spinning planets, the shooting stars; all things of the universe, including ourselves, are vessels that carry the creative spark. The hidden stitch of light sewn into the fabric of all life is part of who and what we are.

This teaching of the universality of creative sparks implies that whether we are answering the telephone, changing the baby, riding the subway, or writing a poem, we are in touch with the creative source of life itself. Everything we encounter provides the same opportunity for us to meet the creative source: the play of early morning sunlight on our eyelids, the smooth cloth of the pillowcase beneath our cheek, the cutting of carrots and celery. But we must remember that being in touch with the creative is not just a matter of what we come upon as we move through our day. It is right here, the teaching says, in ourselves. When we learn to see with the eyes of the creative itself, every moment is an opportunity for new expression. We are always standing at a gateway of awe.

Mystical Jewish teachings can be quite compelling. At least part of their intent is to light a pathway that people may follow to the source of creation and life itself. At times the teachings can be quite provocative. Most of us who are familiar with the Old Testament are aware that when the Divine first speaks out of the Great Silence of the void, the words "Let there be light!" resound through all parts of the beginning world. We also know that the phrase that follows this command is "And there was light!" In the tradition, this light was brought into existence by the divinely spoken words. This is the root of the mystical belief that since God articulated the entirety of the creation into existence, every element of the visible and invisible worlds — all physical matter in the universe — is comprised of the original letters of the Hebrew alphabet spoken in the beginning by the Great Creator. In other words, we and everything we encounter — every tree, every flower, every birdsong; every grain of wheat that ends up on our breakfast table; every glance and gesture we see and make during the day, and even the atoms of air within which we move our bodies — are originally made of a divinely articulated alphabet created by the Source of Life.

I first encountered this teaching in a conversation with a friend. Initially, I could hardly make sense of it at all. We even laughed together as I tried to imagine what letters made up my mouth and nose. My friend was a gentle guide, however, and in between bouts of laughter he told me a few of the letters that constituted the area around my eyes and what the tradition says they mean. I listened carefully, because the interpretations were beginning to appeal to me. They possessed a certain quality that awakened my intuition and faced me in the creative and spiritual direction I call home.

After my friend left, I went outside to stand on the bridge that separated my house from the road and looked up at the sky. It was one of those clear nights of early winter, very cold. The Milky Way flowed above me like a river of stars. I let myself begin to absorb what I had been told by imagining that the heavens were an immense ark that held the sacred scrolls of the Torah, the Jewish Law. Fairly soon I saw that the ark held an illuminated scroll of white letters written on the black papyrus of space, and that this papyrus was also made of letters, ones I couldn't see as it turned endlessly throughout all time. It's an alphabet of stars, I told myself. I was amazed. Since it really was quite cold I started back to the house, and as I did I looked at a more familiar world. The towering sycamore and pine. The river that ran beside my home. My hand. It could be, I thought. How wonderful. We are surrounded by the mystery of unrecognized words.

It is a remarkable thing to realize for any artist. For anyone. To grasp even a little of what this implies can make quite a difference in how we move through the world, seeing what we see and hearing what we hear. It opens our hearts and excites possibility in our imagination. Suddenly, the source of life appears within reach. "You hold the book of creation in your hand," my friend told me. "Look at it. Learn to read the book."

Copyright © 2003 by Peter Levitt. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Peter Levitt's books of poetry include Bright Root, Dark Root and One Hundred Butterflies. He has also published fiction, journalism, and translations from Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. In 1989 he received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award Fellowship in Poetry. A longtime student of Zen, he edited Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of Understanding and Jakusho Kwong's No Beginning, No End: The Intimate Heart of Zen. He has been leading workshops in writing, creativity, and spirituality in the United States and abroad for thirty years.