Creativity Book Two: Fingerpainting on the Moon

Photoshop by Wolfgang Staudt

Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom

Peter Levitt

ISBN 0-609-61048-1

Amazon link

Peter Levitt has worked for over 30 years with writers, artists, and others who wanted to explore their creative depths. He relates that before starting something new, we feel excited, anxious, frightened, hopeful. Often times a feeling of joy—that feeling that comes from expressing ourselves in a new and creative way. In the author’s note he refers to our inner critics which he calls the “hungry ghosts”. My favorite name for them is the “committee”. They ran my life for many years until I learned how to shut off the voices.

Levitt weaves stories throughout the book from his students to suggest that the path to joy includes: starting in silence, risk, everything is permitted in the imagination, how to feed a hungry ghost, the narrow place, a need to know, when the stone woman dances-the mute bird sings, divine breath, naked mind, naming, the bones beneath the bones, the riddle of the hands, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground, a matter of chance, paradise now, time to die, and bull’s-eye.

The following is an excerpt from “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” (I have chosen it because he found this title from one of my favorite poets—Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi who lived in the fourteenth century).

“I want to explore prayer from a perspective that may be quite new in the West. Afterward, when you write, I’m sure you will see how to use this teaching to creatively bring your deepest self to life. In the Sufi tradition it is taught that all things in the universe are constantly in prayer: every leaf and tree, every stone, the snowfall on every mountain, and all the night sky stars that whirl invisibly throughout the day. According to this teaching, all things seen and unseen, know, and unknown, are simultaneously and constantly in prayer. When you hold a flower, or a baby, or your friend’s or lover’s hand, you are holding a life in prayer. I think it is fair to say the tradition also believes when you hear a song coming from across a field—for example, a song filled with its own beauty as the prayer of gratitude I somehow became—then singer and song and field are prayer. In other words, being and prayer are synonymous.”