According to my American Heritage Dictionary, the word “craft” comes from a Middle English word that means “strength.“ The first two definitions for the word craft are:

1 – Skill or ability in something, especially handwork or the arts; proficiency; expertness.
2 – Skill in evasion or deception; cunning; guile.

That definition sounds like us, doesn’t it? We’re noble craftsmen; we’re the makers of beauty for the planet. And, having been forced to hide the truth about who we are from the very same people who need what we do, we’ve learned to be crafty, cunning, creatively clever by necessity, in order to survive. Straight men may be from Mars, the planet named for the god of war, but our guardian is Mercury, the ancient Roman god who invented the flute and the lyre, and was the patron of travelers, young men—and was also the protector of thieves. With wings on his feet, this cousin of the fairies gave his name to the only metal that’s a liquid at ordinary temperatures, an in-between element that characterizes us as well. One of Mercury’s many tasks was to conduct the souls of the dead to the Lower World. In alchemy mercury was symbolic of transmutation. Crafty trickster that he was, after more than two decades of holding friends’ and brothers’ and lovers’ hands as they crossed over from AIDS to angeldom, Mercury and his snake-entwined staff that’s become the physician’s symbol, is another mark of our multiple callings as craftsmen of life, and of life after life.

I’m one of those people who organizes his thoughts by listening to other people’s thoughts. I have a large collection of quotations that inspire me, and in the tradition of spiritual seekers who’ve turned toward the East for spiritual guidance, I have done the same thing for this issue. Living in San Francisco, on the western edge of a large right-leaning and highly slippery landmass, I turned to that great American sage of the mystic East, Henry David Thoreau, who had this to say about the subject at hand:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Well, that’s what he wrote, but the historical record tells us that he did both, lived and uttered, in scores of quotable words that more than a hundred years after his death can still teach us how to live a craftful/crafty life. After all, this is the man who said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” This 19th century queerish guy had other things in mind. In a capitalist consumerist culture, where speed and mechanization are highly valued, don’t think that creativity should be a 9-to-5 job. Thoreau reminds us:

It is a great art to saunter.

That’s the first thing we need to know if we’re going to craft a satisfying life. Slow down! To create you must rest and renew yourself. Notice moon, and when the crocuses come up. Learn your own cycles and trust them. Be pregnant with doing nothing from time to time, and let those still and silent places nourish you.

Many of us were told that travel is ennobling, and today we can jet around the world in hours. But when we’re not, cell phone in hand, we can walk down the street in one city and talk to someone half the globe away. Alas, it seems to me, doing that can directly impair our ability to be good craftsmen. So turn off your cell phone, leave your Walkman by your bed, pay attention to everything that’s going on around you, and be guided by these words of Thoreau:

I have traveled a good deal in Concord.

In other words, Rule Two for life-crafting is this: Stay home. And if Home doesn’t satisfy you, change it. Make what you can’t find. And love what you can find.

Western faiths have tended to instruct us that our life’s aspirations ought to be directed upward, toward that which is beyond our senses, out of reach, just beyond our grasp. But this Eastern teacher reminds us that:

Heaven is under our feet
as well as over our heads.

That’s my third rule for creating a delicious life for yourself: Get grounded, in whatever ways work best for you.

One false myth of parenting is that we come into the world as little blank slates, as empty computer disks waiting to be written on. But the truth is that we come into the world as souls with prior history, and if that history isn’t honored by the people who raise and teach us, it obscures our inner light and prevents us from doing what we came here to do. Trust your inner calling, trust your dreams. Doing this is often called “being selfish,” but in fact it’s the opposite, not self-ish, but Self-ish, soul-ish, soul-full and able to feed other people’s souls as well. Don’t be afraid to step out into the world with your desires. Some Eastern sages might want us to extinguish our egos, but my favorite Eastern woodland sage of this sacred continent offers this important reminder to us:

I should not talk so much about myself
if there were anybody else whom
I knew so well.

That leads me my next and last rule for creative living. Be full of your Self. When you are, you are a cup overflowing, from which others can slake their thirst. Be a wellspring of life, and your life will become a blessing. Trust that your own craft will emerge from you, like rose from bud, like morning from night, with an inevitability and unique beauty, if you let it. Allow pleasure to be a part of your unfolding. If what you’re doing doesn’t please you, it isn’t true to who you are. And if you have to judge yourself at all, remember that the criteria for a well crafted life is not, “He did a good job by all external standards,” but, “What he accomplished in and with his life was what he set out to do.” And remember these words of Thoreau’s, overheard a few days before he died:

One world at a time.

We hope you've enjoyed this excerpt from White Crane. We are a reader-supported publication. To read more from this wonderful issue we invite you to SUBSCRIBE to WHITE CRANE. Thanks!