Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.

Sit in silence, without distraction, and read this post. Silence the part of you that makes false claims about the utility of background music or the necessity of leaving your cell phone turned on. Silence the part of you that wants to argue with me, right now, about my unreasonableness, the part of you that makes claims for this or that distraction. Still the monkey mind that never shuts up, never stops talking, never ceases inventing new ways to jostle, cajole, argue. Stop arguing and listen: the voice of a writer can only be found within silence.

Silence.

Start with that. Stay within it. Allow it to grow around you, to blossom, to disclose the images and words that inhabit the landscape of your inner life. Don’t control it, or direct the flow of that nascent energy. Sit, and read, and watch yourself.

Forget that you are trying to write. This fact is irrelevant to the creative process. It is a curiosity. A writer finds and follows the creative voice. The means by which this happens, the structure in which it unfolds, the particulars of the path: these are secondary and inconsequential. A writer follows the path, whenever it appears and wherever it leads.

A writer does not invent or create the writing. Instead, the act of authentic writing leads the writer. Accordingly, the task of the writer is to find — within — the stream, thread, and path of creative energy. Writing inhabits its own life, is its own animal, is a being struggling to be free of the cages we build around it. Don’t take my word for it. Find the cage, find the animal.

Listen.

Stop arguing. Your arguments, like mine, only serve to strengthen the cage. The animal of the creative is not swayed by our smartness, our wit, our experiences. It does not care how many books we have read or how many fancy words we know. It is not interested in our expertise and the many ways in which we layer our insecurities one over the other.

The animal of the creative wanders the landscape of gods and heroes. The animal has seen things we no longer remember. The animal is what we once were but have chosen to cage as a means of protecting ourselves from the vastness of what we cannot grasp, the depths into which we no longer dare to gaze.

The creative animal is primordial, eternal, wise beyond our knowing. It has been waiting for us, all this time. Listen to what it has to say.

Write.

Allow the creative animal to write for you one good word, or sentence, or paragraph. Don’t mess up the writing. It is difficult to say what this means, this messing up. Perhaps you are cool, or smart, or erudite. Forget all that crap. It is meaningless. Write honestly. Let the creative animal speak through you.

If, as you write, you start to worry about what people might think of your writing, you may as well not start. Give it up now, before you waste any more time. Or tell the part of you that wants to be a rabbit rather than a wolf to shut the hell up.

Write something. Don’t worry about what genre it is. Genres have no meaning. Writing — all writing — is, at heart, an extended negotiation with the creative animal. That animal is partly you, yes; but is also not you, is wholly an emissary of that mystery we run from and slide toward.

And the animal is — for the most part — silent. Do not forget this. Words are not the creative, cannot be the creative, will never be the creative. They are echoes. Treat them as such. Find the source of those echoes.

Find the cage. Find the animal.

There is a crossroads, and a gate, in all the old tales. On one side lies the known, the practiced, the familiar. And on the far side, unseen and unimagined, lies the Other: the one we left behind, who has been waiting all this time. That threshold is a holy place; it does not decay, nor can it be thwarted, nor can it be lost within the tangle of grooved and meandering ways. The crossroads remains, and is protected. The air is still, and warm. Drops of morning moisture lie upon the tips of slender grasses. A sound comes from the far side of the gate; the soft warbling, perhaps, of a stream in the near distance. You reach for that gate — we all do. It might be opened with a small and gentle push.

And on the other side one finds the ancient gods, the ones we have forgotten. They exist now only as dreams, as figments, as fragments of tales buried by the heedless weight of time. But it is from them that we learned to write, to sing, to measure, to craft the world into the shape of our own image. We left them behind long ago; but in all the myths, they were our first teachers.

In the oldest Egyptian tombs and temples, in rooms festooned with hieroglyphs, in texts that lay undeciphered for five thousand years, one may read of an ancient god who is the bringer of knowledge and of illumination. He is the mythological ancestor of the many guides and mentors who populate the tales of every culture. He is the original storyteller, the inventor of writing, the trickster and wayfinder. His name is Thoth. The Greeks called him Hermes. He illuminates the labyrinths, the lost and switchbacking tunnels, and he is keeper of that great and hidden ancient library that adventurers still seek but have not found.

It is Hermes — whose many titles include the bringer of dreams, the watcher by night, the thief at the gates — who so often appears, at the crossroads, as both guide and protector. He knows the paths to hidden things, is the patron of knowledge, and is capable of traveling through the underworld unscathed. He is the border-crosser, the wanderer, whom the ancient texts describe as the “master of spells and words of power, the voice of truth.” The wayfinder knows all the subterranean passageways. His symbol is the ibis bird, or the crane, whose beak is like the crescent moon, bright in the dark sky.

By whatever name he is called — Thoth, Hermes, Merlin, Gandalf, Yoda — his presence stretches far back. As long as we have told tales he occupies a central place within them, helping and healing. He stands at the gate, and watches by night, and wanders, and guides the heart home. He is the truth-teller. […]

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom will know that traditional teaching methods -- authorial, minimally interactive, focused on individual effort as opposed to collaborative experience -- are not the best way to learn what we need to know. Accordingly, we forget much of what we learn in school and remember most of what we derive from life experience. This makes sense; after all, life is immersive, and engaging, and consistently packed with challenges that are enormously relevant to our personal and professional development. Shouldn't school be like this?

 Here's my short list for how improve the purposefulness, meaning, and efficiency of education:

•  Minimize emphasis on the authorial role of the teacher (or instructor, or professor, or whatever status-enforcing designation you prefer). The essential task of a teacher — whether in the school system, the family, or the community — is not to impart information. A teacher does not, in fact, teach. Instead, a good teacher attempts to engage students with their own learning. In the ideal learning environment, students teach themselves. In this context, the role of the teacher is to provide support and mentorship, to offer resources and perspectives, to mediate conversations, and to contribute the odd bit of professional lore. That’s all. Students learn best through personal engagement, not through the delivery of content by an authority. An authentic teacher facilitates the ground of learning, brings the students together, then gets out of the way. In the best learning environments, the teacher is invisible.
• Maximize learner responsibility. I shift the language here to learner to emphasize that authentic educational experiences are not contingent upon submission to an expert (student) but rather on the engagement, personal and social responsibility, and commitment of the person engaged in learning. This perspective is one in which learners act individually and collaboratively to design and implement their own strategies and outcomes for the learning process. This requires participants (especially teachers) to trust the process, to focus on relationships as much as content, and to emphasize process more than product.
• Recognize that learning is often nonlinear (chaotic, to use the proper term). Learning is not a straight path but a spiral. Learners follow this spiral in unique and surprising ways. But as long as they are guided by an authentic spirit of inquiry, the path always leads  -- eventually -- home to the core of learning, which is another way of saying that learning is the path of personal development. In this sense, all fields of learning represent different facets of a single, vast field of study. Within that field, all things are connected.
• Get out of the seat.The truly colossal amount of research against the practice of sitting in chairs (one such example) has not been sufficient to shift the traditional cultures of education.We sit. It's what we do, it's what we've always done. This method -- with its inertia, and inevitable boredom, and health risks -- is one of the most destructive aspects of the modern educational system. If you want to have a healthier and better classroom, remove the tables and chairs, move about at regular intervals, and allow the body -- which, after all, is the instrument of our consciousness -- to do what it was designed to do.
• Get off the podium. When learners take responsibility for their own process, teachers must shift their emphasis away from content delivery and toward interpersonal details. Accordingly, an engaged teacher finds ways to make contributes in snippets (of no more than about ten minutes), by way of conversations individually and in small groups, through the method of engagement rather than lecture.
• Work in small groups. The classroom is a community, and learners are predisposed to find small families within that community. Assist them in doing so, and in avoiding the predictable cliques and alliances that are simple and persistent artifacts of human nature. View these as opportunities for collaborative learning rather than hurdles to overcome. Small groups are more efficient, more engaging, emotionally safer, and more fun. Use them whenever you can.
• Recognize the artificiality of outcomes imposed by external regulatory bodies. These have limited usefulness and tend to embody the myth of objectivity. Yet outcomes determined by learners -- what am I learning, how will I know when I have learned it? -- can be immensely useful. But such outcomes must grow from the inside, from within the modes of inquiry pursued by learners, and must be adaptable enough to accommodate the ever-shifting landscape of learning experiences.
• Speak the unspoken. One of the pivotal roles of an engaged teacher is to articulate what has not yet been expressed, to help learners explore the undiscovered country, to identify and draw out the awkward, difficult themes and moments essential to every learning environment. This requires delicate and dedicated skill. But learning is not only about illumination, the search for light in the darkness; learning also requires that we explore that darkness.
• Be a mentor. This is the essence of everything above: mentorship. The mentor’s task is to witness, to trust in the spirit of learning, to offer honesty and compassion and skill. And to offer it to the defiant, the truculent, the dismissive, the unready and the unsteady in equal measure. Nothing less.

Please join Ross this Fall for courses in creativity, culture, and writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University:

Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts 3100
Begins September 10, 2009
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Mythological Narratives 3301
Begins September 8, 2009
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Interdisciplinary Arts 3100

This course is about creativity, about making a claim for the fundamental right of intentional creative action. Within that context, we will explore the ancient and modern practices of creative endeavor (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of creativity (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers, poets, sculptors, dancers, craftspeople of all stripes, musicians, myth-makers, and so on). Throughout this process, our guiding archetype will be that of the trickster.

In this course we stake out the territory of the creative, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Creativity involves the search for truth, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

And, finally, the goal of the course is to have fun: to preserve and nurture the creative and imaginative spirit that is the foundation of all the arts and sciences.

Begins September 10, 2009 (ends December 10)
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/Interdisiciplinary_Expressive_Ar…

Mythological Narratives 3301

Creative writing is a powerful, ancient, and yet delicate practice. We write — quietly, often in isolation, in tentative and mercurial moods. We revise, and turn back upon our own narratives, and wonder about the reception our work might meet in the world. Sometimes we hide manuscripts in drawers, or take deliberate action — as did Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi — to prevent our words from making their way to an audience. Kafka and Gandhi were both unsuccessful in preventing their writings from being destroyed; but their impulse to do so, to keep hooded the hawk of their creativity, is common among writers of all stripes.

We’re not sure that we have, really, anything to say; or we are afraid that if our words are not well met we might ourselves be wounded. Or we believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that words have their own life, for good or for ill, and that writing is a means of seizing the power of the gods. This course attempts to explore this conversation — between the writer and the wider world — and to find ways of bringing our writing safely out of hiding.

We will be exploring myth, and writing craft, and method, and the strategic practices every writer must learn in wrestling with narrative. Each of us will examine our strengths — the ways in which the natural mood and flavour of our writing makes itself known — and our vulnerabilities as well: how we get stuck, or lazy, how we lost confidence and gain doubt. How we learn to shut down and hope the whole thing will go away.

This course is about writing, and reading, and making a claim for the fundamental right of storytelling. Within that context, we will explore the ancient practices of myth-making (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of writing (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers of writers and myth-makers).

The threshold between fact and fiction (which is not the same as that between truth and lie) is one of the territories of myth. In this course we stake out that territory, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Myth involves the search for truth, and fidelity to fact, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

Begins September 8, 2009 (ends December 8)
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/crwrcrs.html