wishmamas :: heartfelt stories about the extraordinary journey of art and motherhood

karen maezen miller
four seasons: one life

photo by denise lynnette andrade

Karen is the author of Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood and a Zen Buddhist priest. She blogs at Cheerio Road [www.mommazen.blogspot.com]

Calling my creative process a process is like calling my meditation a meditation. The words dignify the experience far beyond recognition.

My creative process usually seems like chaos and my meditation feels like pandemonium. Yet they both teach me to accept and allow my whole life to unfold as the ultimate creative act. All I have to do is trust it.

I am by nature a fast starter and a late bloomer. Not until I was 42, after a 20-year career in marketing and PR, and in my second, midlife marriage, did I become a mother. I didn't begin writing for myself until my daughter was two, so my writing life is inextricable from my mothering life. That's good. Because although it feels like I sacrifice everything for her it turns out I sacrifice nothing.

So a day in my creative life goes like this: first up, make coffee, feed dog, make breakfast, rouse kid, walk dog, return emails, get lost in the drift, exercise, sort laundry, answer emails, read blogs, get lost in the ebb, think about dinner, pull weeds, pick up dog poop, fold laundry, supervise homework, buy birthday gift, check blog stats, hound about chores, cook, get lost in the flow.

When exactly do I create what someone might consider creative? Everywhere, anywhere. When do I write it down? While I've got one eye watching my daughter's gymnastics class, or right now as I scribble this in the 86-degree swelter of my front seat while she's inside taking piano lessons.

I don't only write on the run. Sometimes hours open up at my desk, my fortress and my anchor. More often a word, a phrase, a sentence arrives on the breeze as I yank a weed in my garden or walk my dog Molly around the block. For me, that block is like a breadcrumb trail leading me to someplace I've never been.

I don't task myself with creating my work so much as receiving it. And that means being completely open to whatever is happening in my life right now. My dog and my daughter are very good at steering me toward maximum creative tension!

Some time ago through my Zen practice I let go of the idea of a separate kind of creative space and time. Except for when I check into a hotel by myself, that certain someplace and sometime never come. And to cherish that notion only puts me at odds with my life as it is. I don't want to battle my life. It's only one life! And everyone I love is in it!

I live in a 100-year-old garden that will be here long after I am. Watching and working in it, I see my life as the sequence of seasons, each with its own purpose and rhythm. We do not push the sun across the sky, or force the spring into the summer.

For someone who appears to have accomplished so little, I realize perfectly well that I am writing every day – blog posts, essays, book proposals, pitches, pages and even slow-boat chapters. I may not finish what I'd like to when I'd like to, but I know that I always finish on time.

A Zen retreat for one day, three days, or a week supercharges my flow. I've had whole essays and chapters arrive intact into my hands during one half-hour meditation period. These intense periods of not thinking and not doing are the source of all the good I do.

When I grow weary and disappointed, as I so often do, I remind myself that I am not the maker or the order-taker in this life. I am this life, and it is unfinished. Even when it is finished it will be unfinished. And so I take my time.


Karen is hosting a one-day retreat on Saturday, June 20 in Sierra Madre called Mother's Summer Plunge to refresh and renew spirits before the summer dry spell.
For information, visit http://www.mothersplunge.com/