Mindful June 2017

creativity
“I think I’m going
to shoot myself,”
I screamed in exasperation.
Hugh Delehanty
is a former editor for
Sports Illustrated,
People, Utne Reader,
and AARP The
Magazine, and
coauthor with NBA
coach Phil Jackson of
the bestseller Eleven
Rings. He reported
on Louisville mayor
Greg Fischer's
campaign to create
a compassionate
city for Mindful in
October 2016.
“Why?” asked art teacher Barbara Kaufman
in a soft, melodic voice.
“Look at what I’ve done with that blue paint!”
I replied, pointing to my sad painting of a Buddha
looking like an emaciated Project Runway
model. “It’s a disaster!”
I thought I knew something about painting
when I signed up for this retreat on creativity
and mindfulness at the Spirit Rock meditation
center in Northern California. After all, I’d studied
traditional figure painting at the Corcoran
College of Art and Design and had even spent
time in Italy learning from the masters. But
none of that seemed to matter now. The brushes
were terrible and the paint—a fast-drying,
water-based tempera—was so bright and cheerful
that everything I did turned into a kindergarten
birthday decoration. My painting had
started out as a picture of the Buddha on fire but
had somehow morphed into a muddy purpleand-gray
mess like something by El Greco on
happy pills.
“Let’s turn this into a learning experience,”
says Barbara, trying to calm me down. “Why did
you start to paint over the gray?”
“I thought it was looking too dark,” I replied.
“So that’s when the judgment came in. I think
there’s some muddiness inside of you. You don’t
trust your first instinct. You have to edit it and
paint it over and you end up with a muddy picture.
You need to go with what’s emerging and
listen to what the painting needs.”
How did she know that about me? The reason
I’d come to the retreat was to figure out a way
to grapple with my inner editor. When I was
a young writer, I thought that creativity was
a form of alchemy that required falling into
a deep, trancelike state that only a select few
artists had ever mastered. I was obsessed with
the tricks famous writers had used to stimulate
the muse. The German poet Friedrich Schiller
inhaled the fumes of rotting apples. Gertrude
Stein drove around the French countryside looking
at cows for inspiration. Victor Hugo wrote →
56 mindful June 2017