The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori

Author:John Daido Loori [Loori, John Daido]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

It is true of every art that you cannot acquire

what you have not felt.

GUSTIE HERRIGEL

As a result of this feedback, it became clear that my ideas regarding sensuality and spirituality were a bit confused. This became

a visual koan for me. I set out deliberately to create sensual abstract images using inanimate subjects. I continued until the audience’s feedback was consistent with my own feelings. It was through this process that I was able to get in touch with the feelings that were hovering in the back of my mind while I photographed.

On another occasion I had the opportunity to work in a similar manner with a more challenging aspect of my personality. I asked a date to give me feedback on a set of photographs I had just processed. We were both dressed up and ready to go out to dinner, but I was excited about these photographs, so I asked her to take a few minutes to look at them and tell me what she thought. She opened the portfolio and started flipping through the pages. Before long she was sobbing. “Why do you always take such angry pictures?!” she cried, threw the photographs on the table, and stormed from the room. That was the end of our date. I looked at the photographs, astounded. I had no idea they were going to have that effect on her.

Later that week I showed the images to my creative feedback group and got the same response. I realized that particular day of photographing had had its share of frustrations and difficulties. A commercial assignment had been fraught with problems. When I went off to photograph for myself, I carried those feelings with me. Although I told myself that what I was seeing was dynamic and exciting, in reality it was filled with my anger. I couldn’t see it, but my audience clearly felt it. This, too, became a barrier with which I needed to work. I knew that I needed to get clear on anger. I needed to photograph it deliberately and feel it and see it in my photographs if I was ever going to be able to empower myself to let it go.

Barriers in the creative process sometimes appear in reaction to painful experiences, and these provide a very rich place to study ourselves. In one sense, the process is the same: The only way through the barrier is to be the barrier. But when what we’re facing is really distressing, this may be the last thing we feel drawn to do.

Zen liturgy provides a model for working with this quandary in the offering of memorial poems at funeral services.The heart of the poem is an expression of the dharma, of the teachings.When the officiant recites a memorial poem, he or she acknowledges the person who has died and the feelings that are difficult to allow, as well as the teachings embodied in the person’s life and death.

When my good friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, died, I offered the

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