There are creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they have been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.
A mature creative life, which has discovered its source, finds it is linked to everything. Creation actually requires too little from us, and there is not much in our culture that teaches us to pay attention to the things that require less. These things give birth to the unpredictable surprises that inspire a larger and deeper soul connection with creative life. With the soul well tended, even when all is lost, our creation lives larger than its physical limits. The best that any of us can do with the heaven and hell that surrounds us is to become willing participants in the unfolding of our soul's life. Any creative act emerging from this tending becomes one with the elements of the Mystery.
I found my inner silence, the silence that emanates from the center of the self. I felt it for the first time as something perceptible and real... I felt all shining like a mirror. I had the sense of eternity in space and time. I felt "washed" and clean, whole and at the same time without boundaries, as if universal life had entered me and my heart was beating in unison with its rhythm. But most of all I knew that this was more than just a state of mind. It was a way of living and being and of relating to others.