Zen of creativity

So I am reading the Zen of Creativity Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori who is a photographer, and a Buddhist monk. He starts this book by talking about his time in the 70's studying with Minor White ( White is a well known Buddhist photographer who was one of the founding members of SPE society for photographic education)

The first assignment White gave Loori was this
" venture into the landscape without expectations. Let your subject find you, when you approach it, you will feel resonance, a sense of recognition. If, when you move away, the resonance fades, or if it gets stronger as you approach you you'll know you have found your subject. Sit with your subject and wait for your presence to be acknowledged. Don't try to make a photograph, but let your intuition indicate the right moment to release the shutter. If after you've made an exposure, you feel a sense of completion, bow and let go of the subject and your connection to it. Otherwise, continue photographing until you feel the process is complete."

So after reading this i of course went straight out and tried to do as White said... it was much more difficult to not just break out the camera and start shooting while walking down Shaffer. It was not until this experiment that i realized that one of the side effects of having my nice digital camera (that i saved for 2 years to afford)...was this... i just shoot and shoot... i have no real reason to take 4000 shots in an hour other than the fact that i can. It is so easy to keep shooting when you are working digitally, because its FREE yeah i am an old school photographer who would only work in film if i won the lottery or some rich relative died and left me lots of $$ but in the end i use digital as a tool to make art when money is tight.

but alas i have gotten of subject, the point is it wasn't until i tried to not take pictures and really tried to see what was around me that i realized that i was not truly in the moment i was looking for things to shoot, not letting the world find me. So now i have a refined creative process where i sit and meditate for at least 15 mins before i go out, and when i do go out with my camera i try to not get it out until i am sure that their is a photograph for me to take. Meaning no more walking around with my camera around my neck looking for the shot. I just walk and enjoy the world my neighborhood and my life, and sometimes i don't take one photo and that is one of the hardest things in my life... being patient