It’s 4:37am. I’ve been up working on a single scene for the last seven hours – not a particularly long scene – it will be about four minutes by the time it hits the screen (if it makes it through all the other loops along the way) – but it is essential to the story I am writing; so I have a burning desire to ‘get it right’. This desire is compounded slightly with the knowledge that the director, producers, actors and animators also want to get it right, and they’re all waiting for me to send them the script… in like three hours. In addition, we need the paycheck that will come with its approval! The candle burns at both ends and with each clock tick the wick gets a little shorter. My focus is steadfast and I can feel progress, but man! It feels like I am pushing very hard for the small steps I am taking. Finally my concentration is broken by the realisation that I have been staring at the computer screen for the past 30 minutes and nothing has changed. Take that back. I’ve added one line of dialogue, changed it three times and then deleted it.

Blinking myself back to awareness, I notice the pink hue on the horizon. Sunrise coming. With it comes an anxiousness in my belly to do something. It’s a subtle, distant call, but I recognise it straight away. The message in the breeze is to get up from my seat, jump in the car and drive to where that light is about to rise up over the water. The message is to go surfing. What?! Truth be known, on many mornings I have answered this type of invitation and found myself greeted in the waves by dolphins the very moment I arrive (as if they’d been out there waiting to make sure I answered the call), but with another glance to the clock, I send this invite back to where it came from, with an RSVP that says I will come “as soon as this scene is finished”. There’s too much at stake. I can’t break from here now. Momentarily satisfied, I bring my attention back to my computer. Yes. The scene. I take a deep breath, quiet my mind and bring my hands back to the keyboard with a new sense of determination. Suddenly the sound of a kookaburra bellows through the valley. He’s joined by his extended family – right outside my window – in a resounding cackle that would break the concentration of the world chess champ. It sends a shiver right up my spine and I can’t help but smile. These guys must be working for the dolphins. Against the rising scream of my rational deadline-minded focus, I grab my keys, my surfboard and bolt to the car.

As I drive along the windy road to the coast, my conscious mind settles into the task of shifting gears and keeping me (somewhat) in my lane. The cool morning air circles through the van like Tinkerbell’s magic dust and I start to relax. As I round a bend, receiving my first splintered beam of morning sun through the trees, suddenly BOOM! A creative lightning strikes, and strikes hard. In one single nanosecond of a moment, somehow here on this quiet empty road in the rainforest, the entire scene I’ve now been working on for the past eight hours, arrives into my mind in completed form with a vast improvement on anything I had previously conceived. I swerve to the shoulder and scramble for a pen, scribbling everything I’ve just received on the back of a Woolworths receipt. Done. Continuing to the beach, I enjoy a short surf and make it back in time to finish and send off the scene. No dolphins in the water today (that stop along the way must have altered my ETA) but the spirit of synchronicity has left me with a scene that will go on to be one of the favorites for all who read or watch the story. I am grateful beyond words, sensing that even a seven-day extension would likely not have achieved the same creative result had I remained chained up behind my keyboard.

Life had sent a whispered call in response to my intentions, and on this particular day, I had been bold (or delirious!) enough to listen and follow.

Amidst our modern world of information and virtual communication there is a huge emphasis on grasping and sharing concepts and ideas in a very mental and cerebral way. As we merge this ‘information age’ with the mission of many of today’s spiritual paths, we can quickly wind up living in the top third of our body (and above), leaping from new concept to new concept without ever taking time to genuinely anchor our new understanding into the cellular experience of our lives. In this way we become better and better at talking about who we are becoming, how we are growing and evolving, without necessarily matching that talk with how we walk, with who we are and with what we are actually creating in the garden of our life. If we continue to desire growth and expansion – as I was continuing to desire to write my golden scene – we will of course make progress and move along the path, but until we combine this quiet inside work with a willingness to answer the morning call of the kookaburras – to step away from the cosy confines of our desk and enter a genuine communion with the creative currents of life – many of life’s greatest lightning bolts may have a hard time reaching us, or fully expressing through us in the world.

We are emerging from a great information age with so many new ideas shared, and many old truths rekindled to be shared again. Many of these concepts and ideas have been delivered to us as words written on a page or spoken from a stage, by those who have taken time to venture from the banks of their own river into the inner current of the Universal stream. They have perhaps tried initially to grasp things with their own thinking mind and stay within the zone of what they knew, what felt comfortable, what others had done before them, but eventually there was a breaking point where they were forced to burst that bubble… where they could not hold any longer to the comfort of the ‘known’ and were forced to let go, opening to what is beyond.

And as this great living planet shifts and shrugs her shoulders, we are each in our own way being called to move from a place of mental understanding and emotional awareness into a dynamic arena of genuine spirit-filled knowing, being and action. We have been moving along with this ‘scene’ of our life for quite some time, wondering what’s stopping us from genuinely doing it right, when all along there is a lightning bolt waiting for us on the path, ready to illuminate and inform our steps beyond our greatest imaginings, beyond any book, process or teaching could ever deliver. That lightning bolt is genuine human experience.

We are being called to move from this age of information into an age of integration where spoken word is secondary to the light of our being expressed in the world through the clear expression in our eyes and our spirit-filled action in the world. Ancient Essene texts tell us that the purest Divine teaching available to us is not in the lessons and words of man, but in the great book of our life.

Many of our ancient indigenous cultures knew this and lived this as a way of being. They recognised that there is a great and constant stream of communication flowing to, through and around us in every moment. All we have to do is tune into the flow, and the river will take us exactly where we need to go. They recognised that all of life is like a great symphony and as we learn to listen to the notes of the birds, to the song of light reflected on a morning leaf, to the whispers in the wind, every answer to every question and the fulfilment of every genuine need and desire is here for us in this stream – accessible not through lofty thinking but through grounded connection to the inner pulse of life; available not through human force and running faster to keep up with the treadmill, but through letting go and slowing down enough to come into alignment with a higher way.

Perhaps because I am a very slow reader (like one page per day as I drift off to sleep), I have always been a very kinesthetic learner. I can watch something and read about it with a certain level of understanding of how it applies to me, but one clear moment of genuine experience gives me the lesson for life. At a base level I believe we all learn this way. We may be able to gain awareness of concepts and a level of rational understanding from reading, listening, seeing and sounding things out, but true knowledge – the type that stays with us as a way of being – must be experienced, must be embodied. At the deepest level, we learn by doing. When we can relax enough to begin to hear and trust and move with the great guidance that is available to us, we begin to see a path of great flow opening up within and before us.

As I once heard a Tibetan monk say, “Meditation isn’t sitting on a cushion. Meditation is what we do in our life after we have sat on the cushion”. Next time you feel you may be stuck in the writing of your own scene in creativity or life… next time you have a key decision to make or find yourself searching for the answer to one of your soul’s great questions… next time you are keen to learn a new idea or concept in consciousness… answer the morning call to enter the book of your life and see what great wisdom is waiting to reveal itself in the genuine embodied steps on your path.

Chip Richards is an author, speaker and story guide. He is the creator of the “Moving Mountains 33-Day Journey” and “Writing the Movie Within” workshop experience exploring the art of conscious story and screenwriting, from the inside out (offered this July via www.livingnow.com.au).