Spiritual Life & Creative Work

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“Writing is like putting together Ikea furniture.
There’s a right way to do it, but nobody knows what it is.”

Paulette Perhach, author of Welcome To The Writier’s Life
qtd in How to Finally Write Your Nonfiction Book

Most every morning I take a few minutes to meditate and read from Daily Doses Of Wisdom. It helps me calm and see a bigger picture. I'm trying to learn to accept and let go. Good thing I'm working at it most every day. I have a lot to learn.

Today's dose from Mary Jo Meadow's and Kevin Culligan's book Christian Insight Meditation intrigued me:

Let us look at spiritual life as many spiritual giants have portrayed it. At the beginning, the work is mostly ours. We must do our part or nothing else will happen. In the middle, increasing purity is both God's and our work together. In the end, God will do it all. Twentieth-century Vedantic mystic Sri Aurobindo added that, in the very, very end, we realize it was God all along.

I like that movement even if I'm not a religious person. It begins with my choice, becomes the work and me, and maybe at the very, very end I'll realize that it was the work all along and I was a willing instrument of it.

Writing is like that. It first requires the choosing. People say I could write a book about that but don't pick up the pen. Even with pen in hand and paper at the ready, we must choose not just to want to write but to actually do the work. Deciding to do something isn't worth much until I get deep into it, preferably weeks and months in. Only then do I know I've really decided instead of just wishing it were so. Writing begins with the choosing.

After we've chosen writing, there's a long period of tension that can be difficult. We pull and push against the work which pulls and pushes back. The work goes well or disastrously without our understanding of how to engineer things so the good outweighs the bad. It feels difficult if not impossible. Many times it feels as if instead of God working together with us some demon keeps us from good writing.

This is when persistence and perhaps faith come into play. We come back to the page again and again. We keep going. And we hold onto faith both in the writing and in ourselves.

I'm still in this middle land, feeling those tensions, but I've had flashes, brief moments of the feeling that may become a realization at the very, very end. There are those moments when the work takes over and I dissolve before it. The words come to the page not out of thin air but through me, a nearly frictionless conduit. It's as if I'm pulled along by the words. Call it writer's high or God working through me. Whatever its name, I think of it as the work, my personal savior.

Letting go and accepting apply to writing as much to meditating. Creation is an act requiring more than just diligence and sweat. There must be a willingness to let something work through us and an acceptance that the most creative act may be deciding to get out of the way of something that just might be a miracle.

Sitting Alone...

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My previous notebook entry ended with this shard: "Sitting alone..." I wrote that while sitting alone during lunch at school. We eat with the kids rather than have any kind of break, so I chose a back table on which I opened my notebook and pen. A colleague at the next table asked if I wanted to join her table.

"No. Thanks," I said with a wave of my hand. "I'm good." Pointing to my notebook, I was about to say, "I have things to write," but another colleague interrupted saying, "he never wants to join. He'd prefer to be all on his own." It isn't the first time I've offended her and left her feeling rejected. I shrugged, not wanting to explain and annoyed with her neediness. I went back to writing for two words — Sitting alone — but some hell broke loose with a couple kids and I got up to deal with it. Lunch ended and, collecting my notebook, I saw what I had written, uncapped my pen, and added three dots as a kind of emoji for longing.

All I want so many times is to just be left alone.

I feel like I should apologize for that desire. I feel obligated to say that of course I also enjoy being with people... I feel required to follow the habits of society, to re-join Facebook, do my running in packs, participate in group texts, watch popular shows and movies, and help my offended colleague feel better by joining her for lunch. Then I remember Naomi Shihab Nye's The Art Of Disappearing.

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

J.K. Rowling wrote this recently: "I suppose I must spend most of my conscious life in fictional worlds, which some people may find sad, as though there must be something lacking in my personal life." I get all of what she's saying there. Of course she has to spend most of her life in fictional worlds and thank goodness she does. I also understand how others might find it sad and wonder what she is lacking. Why choose solitude so deep it seems like withdrawal and loneliness? Because it is anything but.

I'm a little disappointed she went on apologize, saying there really isn't anything lacking in her personal life. Then again, if J.K. Rowling feels the need to apologize for sitting alone... I'm in good company.

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished

Atop the printed agenda for the seminar I'm attending, my friend wrote "In the real world, nobody writes alone." I'm not sure I agree. I share this room with seven writers, a mug of coffee, a doughnut, a pen and notebook, and my Chromebook. If I had to give one thing up, it would certainly be the other people.

I'm really sorry about saying that, folks.

My friend told a story earlier. He had a reading to give one evening but nothing written. He locked the door and wrote for six hours, leaving time for only one read-through before presenting it to people who would brook no nonsense. I almost held my breath as he told the story not because I was nervous for the outcome — he and I can put good writing together whenever we have to — but because I was jealous. "That sounds like heaven," I said. "Locked door, hours of time, and writing." I may have sighed.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

I'm in the back of the seminar room. I have headphones playing The Bad Plus loud enough that I feel as if I'm sitting alone... My words appear on-screen through the simple magic flowing through my fingertips. Writing begins in a comforting and warm solitude that some find too lonely. Good for them. I don't want them to join me here or invite me over to their table. I need to be alone.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

Others at this seminar have been on Facebook, email, phones, the news. Maybe they can write in a crowd but I can't. Even in a crowded room I sit alone "trying to remember something too important to forget."

If I were writing in order to just be alone, I might need to apologize, but I am sitting alone because for as long as I can remember I have had a new project. It will never be finished. I need to get back to it now.

And I'm not sorry.

Accept & Explore

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I ran a lot of hills last summer. At first I gutted them out just trying to get over. It wasn't fun and made hills more difficult than they needed to be. Luckily, I talk to myself while running and on as I started up one hill I said this:

Accept what the hill gives you. Give the hill what you've got.

I've been in therapy for more than a decade and am just starting to learn things. My therapist is wise and thoughtful, but I tend to reject most advice and counseling thinking, That's fine for other people... or Yeah, but... About four months after she suggests some ridiculous, wrong-headed idea I figure out that it is spot-on and of tremendous help.

Years ago, discussing a conflict in which I found myself, she suggested that I simply accept what was happening. "You mean surrender?" I asked. She waited for me to think about it. I said, "I can either fight or surrender and I'm not giving in." She waited, maddeningly patient, then suggested that acceptance isn't surrender. The situation did not require me to win or lose.

Of course I resisted. I'm a binary kind of guy. It was months before I realized that entering the battle meant I had already lost and there's a wide expanse between winning and losing.

Hills aren't battles. They're just hills and geology says they've been here a few million years and aren't going anywhere fast. Might as well accept them. And running uphill I have the opportunity to see what I have to give. That's a cool way to think of it. It's an even cooler way to feel.

Feeling open to the possibility that life isn't a battle to be won and there are more than two options available allows me to move up the hills and get over them. I accept and explore. And the view from atop some of those hills goes on and on as if there is no end to what I might see.