"…healing and creativity are different pieces of a single picture…The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes…is a particular state of consciousness called reverie." -Elmer Green, Menninger Foundation

   What causes the tectonic plates of our hearts to shift in ways that open us to healing or to bursts of creativity? The true caregivers among us know that some process is required.

   Mother Theresa relied on prayer. In this state, she reports moments of reverie that brought her into the kind of dreamlike state that allowed her to meet God.

   Yet, she also knew that her searing encounters with the poorest of the poor could crack open a pathway for Love to travel through her and into the hearts of lepers, the dying and the starving children haunting the back alleys of Calcutta.

   Artists often use strange tricks to kick-start their creativity. Charles Dickens, author of countless classics (including, of course, A Christmas Carol) thinking that magnetic forces helped him to create, turned his bed to the north.

   Beethoven poured cold water over his head, believing it stimulated his brain.

   But, all artists understand that it is reverie that they can open them to Beauty's energy where they can discover and begin to incubate the ideas that will touch our souls.

   How do you, as a caregiver, prepare yourself to be a healer each day?

   Any occasion can provide a bridge across which we can walk from ennui to Beauty.

   Those who measure dawn and darkness tell us that the shortest day of the year (or longest night) arrives with the Winter Solstice (December 21).  The ancients (and some contemporaries) viewed this longest night as something to be either celebrated or feared.

   Yet, the long night can symbolize the state we occupy when we grapple with suffering. As caregivers, we can consult our own chapters of pain in order to find the compassion the ill need from us.

   The sages among us engage reverie in their journey to healing and to Beauty. Inside this reverie they can imagine what Love looks like and translate it into this world for us to appreciate (or ignore.)

   We can celebrate the healers and the artists. And we can learn from them how we may, each short day and long night, find our way into the light.

-Erie Chapman

Photographs: "Tia in Reverie" and "Full Moon # 1" copyright erie chapman 2012