Create Your Own Reality

you are a creative animal

Dec 03, 2024

Today, on the morning after Thanksgiving. I removed my clothes under the whispering leaves of an old cottonwood named Rachel and stood motionless in the warm winter sun. The morning sun had only just broken free of the clouds, and the air was chilly, but today I wanted to feel. I wanted to feel the cold breeze raise the hairs on my skin as it whipped around me under the rattling foliage of the aging tree.

When it finally felt like I could sense every inch of me, I walked to the edge of the water and dove into a silent blue-green world, where I watched the sunlight weave shifting, luminescent curtains of lace that undulated slowly between the deep shadows of the cottonwood.

This place, called Barton Springs, has saved me many times over. It is a rarity. A gem. A sanctuary that sparkles aquamarine in the heart of a major city. I come to Barton Springs to escape, to refresh, to exhaust myself, to meditate, to meet friends, and to briefly forget what is happening in the world, which seems to be hurtling towards an ever rising insanity.

Later, after I dressed in the chill wind and walked out, I passed a crested cormorant drying its wings on the side of the pool. Cormorants are sea birds that winter in Central Texas and hunt for fish in the springs. They have deep indigo-black feathers, a sinuous, snake-like neck, and eyes so brilliantly blue that you’d think they were fake. Let’s call this one George.

George watched me with suspicion as I walked by close enough to reach out and grab him. He coyly put on an air of being unconcerned, but still cocked his head back and forth–staring at me first with one brilliant turquoise eye and then the other.

What does that cormorant see when it looks at the world? I wondered as he turned his attention back to the water.

As I mulled over what George might be thinking, I had a realization about my own experience that morning. I’ve always thought of Barton Springs as a place where I can escape the world ever so briefly. But as I walked away from George, I began to see it in a different light.

The whispered voices of the cottonwood leaves, the shifting rays of sunlight in the water, even George… all of those things were magical, but they were only a tiny slice of reality that I carved out of the million other things happening at the springs and in the world during that hour or so. What I focused on and then wrote about was a choice, and I could have just as easily focused on the grating sounds of construction from the renovation across the pool or the little kid who walked by me and said “What’s he doing, mommy?”

This is a creative act.

In almost every minute of our lives, whether we intend to or not, we create an impression of the world around us. It’s almost impossible not to. The closest we can come to not creating our own slice of reality are meditation practices that encourage us to strip away our thoughts and just observe the sensations reaching us. But I’ll tell you now, that type of meditation is not easy. As in, very difficult.

I learned meditation at a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan when I was in my early twenties. The monk at the Cloud Dragon Temple was a quiet man. That may sound like a stereotypical monk to you, but I’ve met monks that run the gamut from nearly invisible to loud, bawdy and hilarious. This particular monk was unassuming. If he was surprised to find a young American joining his morning meditation, he never showed it. He treated me the same as he did the two Japanese who were there when I started.

After a couple weeks of us struggling to completely empty our minds as we sat in seiza with our legs gradually falling asleep, the quiet monk suggested counting. “Start from one,” he said, “and whenever a thought enters your mind, start over.”

He asked if we understood, and turned to leave the room. I shuffled my butt over my legs trying to encourage blood flow. Then, the quiet monk stopped by the sliding wood door, looked back at us, and without any humor in his voice, said “It took me many years to get past one.”

The whole reason for that story is to show you how excruciatingly difficult it is to really empty your mind of thoughts and see the world as it is. Consequently, we see the world through filters of our own device. To a greater or lesser extent, we all create the world we experience.

This filtering of reality goes even deeper than you might think. Neuroscientists who study cognition and perception theorize that our perception of reality is not actually the reality around us that we are sensing at any moment. Instead, our perception is created from memories of what you have just sensed mingled with your expectations of what the world around you should be. They call it Predictive Processing.1

What that means is that your experience of the world is not just observation. It is an active process of modeling reality. A creative process. It happens without you thinking about it, because this is the way we perceive the world around us.

I bring this up is to show you that we really are creative animals. We create and create and create. We create constantly – starting from the way we perceive what is around us, and building all the way up to the conception of artistic and scientific masterpieces. And everything in between. From the way you build friendships, to the way you drink your coffee or tea, you live a life imbued with creativity.

So… you may not think of yourself as a creator. But you are.

Meanwhile, since I took you to Japan, I’ll leave you with a bit of Japanese calligraphy that I did in France this summer. This June I spent a month in the countryside of Burgundy on a writing retreat to start my next novel. In case you hadn’t heard, I wrote a novel last year. It’s called A Cat in Sancerre, and I’ll write a post about it before too long.

So anyway, for one month this summer, I lived in a hundreds-year-old French farm house with two foot thick walls where I spent my days writing, my mornings going for long walks through the countryside, and my evenings cooking for my French hosts. It was wonderful. The place was called Chateau du Bois, and it was a perfect place to write.

I also took a calligraphy brush with me, which I used as a morning meditation. The piece below is the character for place, 所. Place was on my mind a lot while I was in France, not just because I was writing, but because my first novel was set in Sancerre, France just down the road and across the Loire river from where I was staying. So one morning I wrote this meditation on 所.

So here we are back to places and how we experience them. Barton Springs, Japan, Chateau du Bois… Every place has character, but the character in a place is also what you imbue it with. You create it.

You are a creator.

This post started as something completely different, but it got sidetracked and ended up in a place I really didn’t expect it to. The creative process! So that other post, on ‘othering,’ will have to wait. :)

Create Your Own Reality

you are a creative animal

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