Waters of Inspiration

Valerie and I traveled to The Miniature Theater of Chester, along with some other Arts Department students, to see a play about a famous poet. We stayed for the “talk-back” discussion after the play, ‘Sixteen Words for Water’.

I found people’s thinking was revealing. The Artistic Director gave a description of the creative state from which a writer or poet operated. It sounded very recognizable to what I experienced in writing –during those times when things did flow. But vocal members of the audience raised objections to it. It seemed that a dreamlike-state was considered of lesser quality than a solidly world-connected state. One woman said she got her inspiration through physical actions, like hanging her laundry.(I can believe she achieves a meditative state that way, but she used that fact to invalidate other techniques, instead of expanding the diversity of techniques possible.)Another speaker countered that her favorite poet described a very real physical world, not a dreamy (or unreal) one. The Theater Founder finally broke in to say they were getting way off topic from this play, and this poet. He dubbed the place of inspiration as necessarily being “through the imagination”.

Although the discussion ended on that final word, you could tell from what had already been said that others would not agree that ‘imagination’ held much weight among the various capacities of the mind. Nor was imagining counted as one of the most respectable activities in the world. I was impressed that we, as a culture, cannot name the state of being through which higher truths flow. Unlike the playwright’s Aboriginal culture having 16 words for water, we have not even one word we can agree upon for that connection point to the spiritual sourcewaters of the cosmos. Realizing this gave me more motivation to discover my own connection point to ‘the Psychic Sea’, as the Ezmereldians would phrase it.

It also made me reflect on my own tendency to discount dreamlike events as less substantial than the mundane, physical-world ones. They may be less substantial in a physical sense, but the school had already taught me to question whether they were more substantial in a spiritual sense, and therefore more important in the grand scheme of life. The Aborigines already knew the importance of the Dreamtime. I was only just beginning to part ways from the mainstream culture’s dismissal of Dreamtime, or Otherworld experiences. I was only just starting to accept that there might be many truths.

When we’d returned from the play, Valerie and I took leave of the others for a quiet walk around the school grounds. On the moonlit paths of the formal gardens, the night presence of Ezmereld dreamed upon one side, and the musical language of the River flowing from Faerie sang softly upon the other.

Valerie had been surprisingly quiet, as we walked together in the garden. The quiet was a blessing that let my thoughts reach outward into the night. I stopped when our path came to the central fountain. Something on the stone seat glittered slightly. I picked it up; someone had left a spool of thin copper wire. The unwound strand of it bent easily in my fingers, and then held whatever turns and twists I’d given it. Dreamily, I watched it take the form of an abstract tree, as I looped the wire down into roots, and up into branches, and down again, and up again, into a spreading form no bigger than 2 inches tall, fanned out from where my other hand grasped the strands together into a trunk. A final strand spiraled up the ‘trunk’ to hold it firm, and I was done with my miniature creation. Valerie proffered clippers, which had been left beside the spool.

As I clipped my mini tree sculpture free from the rest of the wire spool, I smiled sheepishly at having Valerie be such a solemn audience to my creation of a frivolous doodle out of someone else’s wire.” Do you want it?” I asked jokingly, holding it out to her. She didn’t take it.

“I thought you were making it for the fountain,” she said seriously.

“Hmm?”

“That’s why it was here, I’m sure. Someone else must have used the wire to fashion a gift for the fountain, and then left it. I thought you were doing the same. Don’t you have a request you want the fountain to grant? It is frequently used like a wishing well, or to receive offerings to the spirits of this place –whether or not those offerings come along with a petition for aid.”

“Oh, I hadn’t realized I was doing something I was supposed to do. What do I do next?”

“Hold it in one or both of your hands, while you impress upon it the essence of what you offer, or what you seek. Then let it go into the waters of the fountain.”

I held it, cupped between my palms, and thought about my longing to know the place from which inspiration and knowing might spring in my soul.

My gift dropped into the water with a soft plop. I waited, watching the ripples move outward to find the round edge of the fountain basin. I waited, seeking around inside myself for an answer. I waited, tasting the qualities of the garden and night around me for an indicator. Valerie finally broke in to ask, “Do you want to tell me what you asked?--You don’t have to, of course.” I did tell her, and she laughed warmly, saying, “Welcome to the ranks of the Ezmereldi. Our tribe is ever in quest of that answer.”

“But don’t you find it, and then just know?”

She laughed again, as if at a joke. “Life is ever-changing, and so are we. We learn the answer, or parts of the answer, and are nourished at the Spring of Inspiration. But there is always more to learn. As your spirit grows upon that nourishment, so will your capacity to tap, or understand, mysteries that were unavailable to you before; so there is always more to seek. You would have to go elsewhere than here, if you want to find the people who believe they will ‘make it’ to some end place of achievement, and then be done with striving.”

“How does anyone know when a student is ready to graduate then?”

“When the guidance of wise elders offers no better direction than the student’s own intuition and decision making, then the student graduates.”

“That could take forever!”

“For some people,” she laughed. “I suppose you can also graduate when you’ve been exposed to enough of the viewpoints and understanding of Ezmereld that you should be able to use them for your intuition and decision making, even if you don’t. In other words: they may graduate people whom they have led to water, even if those people never drink of it.”

I absorbed this thought in silence for a moment. Valerie then turned to me with a different kind of welcoming warmth in her teasing eyes, and asked, “You’re not planning to wait here all night for an answer, are you? The universe will be able to forward the reply to you wherever you are, you know. Answers can come in the midst of the activities of life –not just during all-night vigils, or monkish contemplation. Aren’t there any activities of life you might be interested in tonight?” She leaned up and kissed me. I decided there might indeed be pastimes sweeter than ‘monkish contemplation’, and I willingly followed Valerie to her room.

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