After he left, I pondered the meaning of his words.  My first thought was that there are only so many ways a person can walk home, and it would be hard not to exhaust these pretty quickly.  But then I considered that if a person deliberately takes a longer route, there are, in fact, an infinite number of ways to walk home.  I started to see the metaphor in all this: an artist has to be on guard against routine, against choosing the same, easy solutions again and again.  He has to take the “long way home” in the sense of experimenting and deliberately trying to disrupt his habits.  But it also dawned on me that the old man’s advice might have been meant quite literally.  In order for an artist to undermine his habitual mental orientations, he needs his physical disorientations: taking a walk, going to a museum, or even bouncing a ball against a wall (I’ve read that this is how Paul Simon writes songs.)  So maybe being an artist is just as simple as choosing to walk home a different way, and letting an inner wisdom take care of the rest.  Artists have always had an affinity for drugs and travel, after all, and probably for this very reason, that such “derangements of the senses,” to quote Rimbaud, inevitably lead to new discoveries.  This seems both like a good method for making art and also a good way of taking the agony of ego out of the process.  Just take the long way home and be ready to receive whatever comes!

There’s a beauty to this simplistic view of creativity, but there’s also a problem with it.  In order to take the long way home, you have to know where your home is.  In other words, for creativity to mean anything, for it to be really fulfilling, it has to be based on a sense of purpose, a sense that, though there are many options and paths, there is some singular and necessary goal that is calling you to it.  Yes, creativity requires that we question our habitual, goal-oriented thinking; yet, without any goals at all, we will ultimately find ourselves more deeply entrenched in our habits — much like the college undergraduate who takes LSD or goes to India, only to find after graduation that he feels compelled to take a dreary job in his father’s law firm.  If we take the long way home without defining what home is, the world will makes that choice for us.  So creative death might be walking home the same way, but it’s also not knowing where home is at all.  In the end, the two amount to the same thing.

As a man in his thirties, I’m very intrigued by the phenomenon of other men my age choosing to start families and then feeling, quite unexpectedly, as though their creative lives have come to an abrupt end.  Maybe this is a particularly American phenomenon.  Maybe in other countries fatherhood is seen more as an extension of a man’s creativity than as a responsibility that leads him away from other creative pursuits.  One thing I have noticed is that the men who most experience tension between family and creativity are the ones who are determined to be better fathers than their own fathers.  I have seen this pattern many times: a man who grows up with an irresponsible father at first uses art to express himself in contrast to his father.  But when he becomes a father himself, he feels that his new family is keeping him from his art.  And this is because, in trying to be better than his father, the man has become impatient with arriving at home.  He keeps telling himself he is home, but what he experiences is not his real home, rather, an imaginary one he keeps insisting on.  And as he keeps insisting on being home, he keeps going over the same path in his mind, digging a deeper rut each time.  He feels the death that the old man warned me about.  He starts to take the same way home every day because, in fact, he could not be farther from his true home.

So what is a person’s true home?  Ajahn Chah said it very well, I think: a person’s true home is peace, but he finds this peace not by grabbing at the false ideas of security and stability in the world around him.  No, he finds peace by systematically rejecting all the premature and unsatisfactory ideas of “home” that the world throws at him.  Just as an artist must learn to say no to the half-baked ideas that spring from his imagination, so too a person must learn to say no to incomplete versions of home that the world tempts him with.  If he fails to do this, he will encounter much sorrow inside and outside himself.  Look at the way people make themselves miserable with dating.  A man meets a woman he likes, and for a while, spending time with her feels free and wonderful.  But then she does something that gives him a glimpse of “home,” and his freedom is suddenly eclipsed by impatience, either to grasp onto her and possess her fully, or else, to push her away and search elsewhere for his home.  Once he’s succumbed to this impatience, it doesn’t actually matter whether he stays or goes; either way, he has replaced his true home with an imaginary one and will find no peace.  Just like the frustrated artist, he finds himself repeating himself in failed relationships.  And though he may think the problem is that he hasn’t put enough energy into building a home, the real reason is that he hasn’t put enough energy into letting go of his illusions.

In the end, both creativity and happiness come down to the same practice: learning not to lie to yourself.  This might seem easier said than done, but the way to learn honesty is really quite simple.  You just have to keep noticing your own lies, over and over again.  As an artist, you have to notice when what you are doing doesn’t feel authentic, and learn to trust the gnawing pain inside that tells you when you are lost.  As a person, you have to do much the same.  It is a long way home, not because wandering is a practice that miraculously leads to becoming a genius or a saint, but because it is only in wandering that we can glimpse all the lies we’ve been telling for so long.  But the good news lies in this paradox: as soon as we discover how lost we are, it’s then that we know the way home.

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

We do a lot of things to escape the rule of our bad thoughts.  We read self-help books, go to therapy, follow spiritual paths, often thinking that the point of these pursuits is to get rid of the parts of our minds we don’t like.  Whenever I teach a beginner’s meditation class, there is always someone who says to me, “I’m here to learn how to control my thoughts.”  But you can’t control your thoughts.  You can’t control them, because your thoughts are the consequences of choices you have already made in the past about what to think.  This might sound strange, but thinking is not a passive act like watching television; it’s more like making a promise, a promise that certain thoughts will have a place in your head.  And just as in the Iranian myth above, once we make a promise, we have no power to deny the thought its rightful place in our minds.

Bad thoughts are like bad leaders in a democracy.  You can’t tell the thoughts to leave until their term is up.  After all, you elected them.  What you can do is understand how these thoughts got to be in charge in the first place and make sure that doesn’t happen again.  This is what is known as wisdom, but wisdom depends on having the patience to accept the duration of every negative experience.  Normally, when bad things happen to us, we ask, “Why me?”  But wisdom isn’t born from this question.  Wisdom is born from another question: “It had to happen, but what can I learn from it?”

Last week, I heard an older man say something very wise.  He said, “A turning point in my marriage was when my wife and I agreed we weren’t going think about breaking up every time we had a fight.  We agreed to be as angry, sad, or hurt as we wanted, but not to think, ‘This is it.  I’m going to leave.’”  His words struck me as both practical advice and a good definition of fidelity.  Normally, we think of fidelity as a set of demands placed on the other person about how to act, speak, or think, and since others never really conform to these demands, at least not perfectly, we go around most of the time feeling betrayed.  That’s when the disillusionment sets in, and we take this disillusionment personally.  We think, “This person was so wonderful and perfect and now he/she has gone and ruined everything!”  As if the disillusionment wasn’t bound to happen anyway.

Worst of all, when we hit a wall with one person, we run in the opposite direction, generally hitting another wall (person) pretty soon.  And this is because we never take the time to stand in front of a wall and examine it or question it.  Can it be climbed?  Maybe there is a door right there in plain sight?  The point is not that no one should ever break up or drift apart.  Clearly, there are times when that is the wisest course of action.  The point is that we think disillusionment is the problem, when, in fact, the problem is our lack of patience to live with disillusionment.

If you think about it, the negative connotations our culture places on the word “disillusionment” are pretty strange, since “disillusionment” literally means, “no longer having illusions,” which seems like a pretty good thing.  Isn’t that the point of wisdom, to no longer believe in what isn’t there?  But we typically say, “Poor Tom, he’s so disillusioned these days.  I hope he meets someone nice, or at least takes a long vacation.”  Why are we wishing a whole new set of illusions for Tom?  In our American obsession with optimism, we treat disillusionment as though it were something shameful, when in fact, it is the healthiest emotion in the world — at least, if we know how to relate to it gently.  The problem is that we tend to associate disillusionment with depression, because we lack the conviction that there is anything out there other than our illusions.  But it’s only by being patient enough to let the world fall apart that we stand a chance of finding a love that does not require illusions.

We should be disillusioned with each other.  Not because we are bad or broken people, but because each of us is carrying around a lot of unnecessary baggage, and we owe it to each other to see past this baggage.  If you love someone, you will certainly discover baggage in him or her.  Just as important, though, is to be disillusioned with your own baggage — the same baggage that most likely attracted you to your beloved in the first place.  This is the hard part, because it clashes with our sense of romance.  But actually, the purity of love depends on questioning the value of one’s own attractions.  It’s important to reflect, “Are the reasons I am attracted to this person really that meaningful?”  The point is not to make other people or relationships look ugly.  Just the opposite: it is the pretty illusions we have about others that turn ugly soon enough.  The point is to find something else, some deeper beauty, in which to sink the roots of love.

Love is disillusionment, not in the sense of growing sick of others, but in growing withthem as they truly are.  Like the beauty of winter, love can be expressed in these words: “Let every leaf fall.  The tree remains.”

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

Yet, now that I am grown, I have discovered another sort of frightening predicament:  the number of people who can — or, at least, will — challenge my stories about myself has shrunk drastically.  It’s not that I am especially untruthful or that I only associate with cowards.  It’s that the ways of the world are such that, all day long, we trade in stories whose truth is usually besides the point.  If I want the answer to your question to be, “Paul is a happy person and he’s doing really well these days,” there’s nothing you can really say to the contrary.  You may well think I’m full of shit, but I may well decide that you think that only because you’re jealous or full of shit yourself.  And so on and so on.  This is why the Buddha described the stories we tell about ourselves as a “thicket” or a “bramble”: if you try to get the bottom of one story, you generally end up in another.  And the weeds only get thicker as you get older.

When I was a teenager, I wrote poetry constantly.  I kept my poems in plain notebooks at the bottom of one of my desk-drawers  One day, my father, a poet himself, found one of my notebooks and began to read from it out loud.  He meant well (he was surprised and elated that his son was writing,) but I was thoroughly traumatized to have my words exposed in that way.  I decided I would hide my words better in the future, but unfortunately, I hid them too well: within a few years, I started writing less and less, until I stopped all together, strangled by writer’s block.  It wasn’t that day alone that caused my block.  It was the gradual strengthening of the idea that my words weren’t my own, that they depend on others’ approval.  For years, I struggled with writer’s block, and my only thought was how to conquer it.

But then something happened: I did learn how to conquer writer’s block, but the more I conquered it — the more I learned how to get my words out at all costs — the more I began to realize that what I was actually doing was becoming more skilled at pleasing  all the people I imagined would read what I was writing.  Rather than learning how to “express myself,” I realized, I was learning how to avoid anything others might find objectionable or dumb, and it was only this tacit people-pleasing that gave me the courage to finish projects and share my writing with the world.  This realization filled me with a new horror.

There is a great prejudice in our culture against writer’s block.  This prejudice is part of our American obsession with productivity.  The point, our culture tells us, is not to ask why you’re producing; the point is to produce.  People joke about the archetype of the disorganized artist, but if you look at the artists, writers, and musicians who actually succeed in America, you will see that it is the hyper-organized, hyper-productive ones, regardless of whether these individuals have anything interesting or valuable to say.  Surrounded by these paragons of prolificness, we forget that writer’s block, though it is sometimes painful and rarely helpful for forging a career in the arts, is often an important expression of dissatisfaction with the cheap and disposable way we usually use words.  Sometimes we can’t write because all the words we have at our disposal are false, and the fact that we recognize this is a good thing.  Writer’s block, in other words, is sometimes writer’s conscience, the awareness that not everything we think is true, valuable, or deserving of being written down.  This doesn’t mean we should stop trying and decide that we aren’t “real writers.”  That’s just laziness, which is actually the opposite of conscience.  Conscience is making more effort to find one’s true voice, not less.

How does one get in touch with this sort of conscience?  The best advice I ever heard given to a writer is, “Write only what you hear in your head.  Treat any other thoughts or words as something you would be ashamed to put down on paper.”  When I first heard this, it sounded strange to me.  What’s the difference between having a thought and hearing one?  All the difference in the world, I’ve since discovered.  When we actually hear our thoughts as voices in our heads (close your eyes, try it, and you will know what I mean) we enter a receptive state in which we are actually discovering something new.  What we hear might not be Shakespeare or valuable at all in and of itself, but the act of listening makes all the difference in the world, for it allows us the possibility of escaping from our habitual patterns of thought.  Another way of saying this is that truth (what all writing is based on, whether writers admit it or not) is not a statement or a proposition; it is a way of being open to what is there before we have the chance to tamper with it.  Most of the time, writers are so concerned with making sense or being sophisticated that they don’t see that sense and nonsense are equally far from truth, for sense and nonsense are based on our self-conscious agreements with the world, not on what is actually there inside us.  This is, again, the scary thing about getting older: you learn how to make nonsense sensible and how to make sensible nonsense without any of it meaning a thing.

“Treat any word or thought that you don’t actually hear as something you’d be ashamed to put down on paper.”  This is the spirit of revelation, actually, the attitude religious people have recognized in their prophets for thousands of years.  In the West, though, we’re weary of people hearing voices, and with good reason.  We have a candidate who’s sure God wants him to be president, terrorists sure they’re meant to put bombs in airplanes — and so we naturally associate this type of inner listening with folly and destruction.  But in many ways, we’ve missed the point in the way we criticize such behavior, for it isn’t listening to the voices in your head that gets you in trouble, it’s believing them.  In fact, not being aware of the thoughts taking place inside your head leaves you more vulnerable to acting on them without reflection.  The spirit of revelation is actually a very cautious one.  It says, “Take down everything you hear exactly as you hear it … and then study its meaning very carefully.”  These two movements of mind — listening and interpretation — are both necessary in order to find wisdom, for if we listen without interpretation, we are at the mercy of delusion, but if we interpret without listening, we are at the mercy of our egos.

In many ways, the process of truly knowing oneself can be thought of as a type of dictation.  Dictation is not very popular any more in our educational system.  We think it’s a passive activity that doesn’t encourage the imagination, and we’ve largely replaced it with group discussion and debate.  There are serious drawbacks to this, though.  For one thing, our memories suffer when we stop listening to the exact way others talk and replace this listening with only a vague sense of what someone else has said.  For another, our emphasis on debate trains our egos instead of our receptive faculties.  Every year I teach, I’m more aware of students’ total inabilities to repeat back to me what I’ve just said.  This is very troubling, not because I’m some sort of genius whose every word they should be hanging on, but because their inability to hear external words exactly implies an inability to listen to themselves.  With our American, democratic emphasis on discussion and argument, it’s possible that we’ve trained a nation of people who really have no idea what they think at all.

Someone asked me recently what my long-term goals as a musician were.  I got a little embarrassed, because to quote Wilco, I’m always a bit short on long-term goals.  I hemmed and hawed, but if I had the chance to answer that question again, I know what I’d say.  I’d say, “I want one day to write only what I hear.”  I’ve had moments of this — beautiful moments — but I’ve never been able to fully sustain this state of pure receptivity, pure dictation, for any length of time.  But what an ideal to aspire to!  To stand in one’s own presence and express it exactly as it is, without modification, without changing a thing.

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

So it turns out that each of us possesses many selves, and that these selves are not fixed or eternal at all; in fact, they are born and exist primarily in order to fight for our attachments.  This means that whenever we lose a fight for one of our attachments, we also lose one of our selves.  As life goes on, we heap up countless identities and also witness the death of these constantly.  Every person’s lifetime is like the cemetery of a little village: things look simple and quiet from the outside, but when you start counting the gravestones, you can see how much loss one small space can contain.

Now, this might seem very depressing to some people, but death is a part of life, and the important question is not whether or not this fact is depressing, but rather, how we should relate to what is dead — what is dead around us, but also, what is dead inside of us.  For when we start to reflect on who we are, we will necessarily find that there are parts of us that serve no purpose whatsoever, and yet, we are afraid to let these go.  We are afraid of the dead, you might say.

All cultures exhibit this common fear of the dead — both inside and outside — and if we are to believe the work of anthropologists, all cultures have at some point had a tradition of actually feeding their dead.  In some ancient Greek and Roman villages, I’ve read, people built coffins with feeding tubes in order to convey food and drink to the corpses once they were buried in the earth.  This is a touching, but also frightening, gesture.  Touching, because it honors those who came before us and made our own lives possible.  But it’s also frightening, because that kind of caring for the dead takes scarce resources away from the living beings who need them.  If this process feeding the dead went on forever, the dead would eventually outnumber the living to the point that there wouldn’t be enough food left on earth.  Of course, at some point, people forget about the dead, and this is a good thing, for we aren’t dead, and understanding this duality between life and death is necessary in order to respect both sides of it.  This is what Nietzsche meant, I think, when he said that forgetting is a life-affirming act.

It is the same with what is dead inside us, for there are many identities and habits we possess that are, in fact, no longer living, growing, changing, or evolving.  Most of these “selves” have to do with past traumas: they exist in order to fight threats that are no longer there.  And though our ghosts do not actually exist, still they can cause us to feed one part of ourselves till another starves.  In medicine, there’s a condition called “infarction,” which is when a clot or some other obstruction causes healthy tissue to stop receiving blood.  It’s the same with the past.  A child grows up with absent or irresponsible parents and develops a sense of “boundaries” in order to compensate for this, yet the sense of self he develops around these boundaries has to continually keep feeding off of confrontation with other people’s lack of boundaries.  So as an adult, the boy-man finds he can only assert himself by fighting with others.  Actually, he isn’t asserting his “self” so much as the ghost of a former self, a ghost that can never grow.  And while one hopes the world will be kind to this boy-man, at some point, it is not other people’s kindness so much as his own willingness to stop feeding the dead that will allow him to be happy.

We all feel at times that we “aren’t enough.”  We enter a social situation or a work situation or a romantic situation and we find ourselves seized by the thought that we are lacking in some way.  Usually, though, when we feel we aren’t enough, the truth is that we are too much: we feel inadequate because we are trying to accommodate the dead voices in us that told us we were ugly or dumb or destined to be alone.  It’s important to see things this way, because normally we respond to the feeling of not being enough by trying to assert ourselves more: by trying extra hard to be pretty or witty or popular.  But this is like carrying more food to the graves of the dead in hopes that in this way we will come to terms with what has come before.  It doesn’t work.  At some point, we have to begin relying on the hypothesis that we will find love only through a negative process.  If we stop giving our love away to the dead, we will find there’s plenty of it here for the living.

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

What does this mean, to have a heart as vast as existence itself?  There are times when we sense that the heart has no edges, that, in love, we know more about the universe than our poor, conditional brains can fathom.  Yet we distrust this vastness, and perhaps with good reason: we are not yet ready for it.  It’s one thing to speak about a heart without edges and another thing to live this truth.  But it’s also important to understand that what separates us from the vastness we glimpse in love is not any mystical boundary.  What separated us is, quite simply, that we confuse our hearts with our preferences.  People say, “I followed my heart,” but what they generally mean is, “I followed my preferences.”  They mean, “I left my wife because another woman seemed more exciting,” “I quit my job because I disliked it,” “I destroyed my body with bad food, alcohol, and drugs, because life seemed intolerable without continual stimulation” — or something to that effect.  This confusion of the heart with one’s preferences leads to a sense that the heart is small and far away from what it desires.  As we give more and more weight to the voices in us that say we are creatures who like and dislike certain things, we begin to know the universe from a narrower and narrower vantage point.  Our love becomes twisted, folded into the shape of a fist.

We all have preferences, and we all think we know what they are, but even though we can list them ad nauseum, we don’t really know them — we don’t really know our preferences as they truly are.  This is because we think that our preferences are what is alive in us, when, in fact, our preferences are what is dead.  Preferences are like light from a long-dead star.  The likes and dislikes we think are at the core of who we are are, in fact, just resonances of events, traumas, and situations that no longer exist.  This is why one of the first lines in A Course on Miracles says, “I am upset because I see what isn’t there.”  And this could be worded even more strongly: to the extent that we identify with our preferences, we are already dead.

It’s important to understand that the alternative to identifying with our preferences is not adopting a passive, blob-like consciousness in which we are neutral about everything.  Many people cling to their likes and dislikes precisely because they feel they are nothing without them, and on some level, they believe that everything else is fantasy.  “Sure,” they think, “It would be great to be fine with everything, but I can’t be that way.”  The alternative to identifying with one’s preferences is not being “fine with everything,” though.  It is just the opposite of this: seeing what is truly there, but doing so consciously and with choice about what one puts one’s attention on.

This seeing with the heart, if you will, is not an idea; it’s something that can be learned with practice.  Every time you meet a person, for example, you can ask yourself, “What good is in this person?” and then be observant.  If you do this reflection honestly, you will find that you can identify some goodness in everyone, whether you like or dislike him or her on the whole.  This is not just an exercise in good manners; this is a practice of emotional survival: if you can’t identify what is good in others irrespective of your likes and dislikes, how can you identify what is good in yourself?

One of the hardest things to learn in any relationship is when to hold on and when to let go.  Let’s say a woman tells a man she doesn’t want to be with him any more.  Should the man say, “Okay, I will let you go,” or should he say, “I refuse to give you up”?  If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that people will give you conflicting advice about what to do.  Some will say, “Respect her wishes!” and others will say, “Show her your love is eternal!”  In fact, the right advice to give is neither of these, for there is never a simply right or wrong course of external action in love.  But there is a right answer when it comes to the inner actions we take with our hearts.  The answer is: be stubborn with your heart, but not with your preferences.  Never let go or hold on based on your likes and dislikes; only do this with your heart.  This means understanding what Ruzbihan understood, that the heart is as vast as existence itself, which means it is bigger than any person or relationship.  If you put your attention on what is good in yourself and other people, knowing when to hold on and when to let go will happen on its own and without pain in either case.  It takes a stubborn heart to get up every day and practice this.  To remind ourselves constantly, in the words of one teacher, “When we learn to see clearly, we will act impeccably.”

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/