The Artist's Way

challenges. How well am I taking them?” In the daily
schooling of her horse, “teaching her to think before she
jumps, to pace herself properly,” Libby has learned the
same skills for her own life.
Part of this learned creative patience has to do with
connecting to a sense of universal creativity. “Riding, my
rational mind switches off,” she says. “I am reduced to
feeling, to being a participant. When you ride through a
field of grass and little flecks of fluff from the wheat ears
float around you, the feeling makes your heart sing. When a
rooster tail of snow sparkles in the sun in your wake, that
makes your heart sing. These moments of intense feeling
have taught me to be aware of other moments in my life as
they occur. When I feel that singing feeling with a man and
know that I have also felt it in a field of grass and a field of
snow, then I know that is really my own capacity to feel that
I am celebrating.”
It is not only the sense of a communion with nature that
creates a singing in the heart. An endorphin-induced natural
high is one of the by-products of exercise itself. A runner
may feel the same celebratory sense of well-being pounding
a dirty city street that Libby finds as she posts rhythmically
along a country trail.
“God is in his heaven; all’s right with the world” is how
Robert Browning characterized this feeling in his long
narrative poem Pippa Passes. It is no coincidence that Pippa
experienced this feeling as she was walking. Not everyone
can afford to ride a horse or even a ten-speed bicycle. Many