How many miracles would it take for you to have irrefutable evidence of the Great Creator? How much proof would be enough to substantiate your faith—one, two, three or more miracles to be sure, you understand.

Don’t reply too quickly. The answer might surprise you.

For many years I believed that you had to have faith in the Creator without any need of personal proof. After all, isn’t that what faith was all about? And that faith would some day pay off with some sort of proof—what kind I could not tell you.

For more about my confrontation with the true meaning of faith, read Faith inside the main site gallery.

A while ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Deepak Chopra on the phone. He was good enough to provide me with a few quotes for an article that has since blossomed into book I’m writing for artists on how to master rejection.

I told Deepak that I was thinking of him while riding the PATH train that runs from Hoboken, New Jersey to midtown Manhattan.

“Why is that?” he asked in his distinct Indian accent.

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Whining has relatives, bored and excuses to name two.

If you are bored, then you are boring.

Excuses. I can’t paint because the light isn’t right; I can’t paint with people watching me; I don’t have a studio; I don’t have a studio that’s big enough; I don’t have the right color oils; I can’t write at night; I can’t compose in the morning; and all the “I can’ts and don’ts” in the universe keep one a prisoner from entering the land called “can do.” Count and keep a log of how many negative thoughts you have in a single day; the number and their cumulative effect will startle you. 

For more about excuses (don’t put it off), read No Whining inside the main site gallery.

Poet Robert Bly has translated the work of numerous South American poets, including Pablo Neruda of Chile who liked to fly kites on the beach. Bly is also the author of a number of nonfiction books; I highly recommend his allegorical work Iron John: A Book about Men (1990).

For more about Robert Bly, visit Questia —the online library for research.

Here is an excerpt from The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly

by Victoria Frenkel Harris

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“There are no ‘plain facts’ in the history of art—or any history of anything else, for that matter; only degrees of plausibility…. Yet we sense that Gauguin, although he tried to share his experience [spirit], he remains an outsider; he could paint pictures about faith, but not from faith.”

—H.W. Hanson, History of Art