Last summer I broke through YEARS of writer’s block. It started in college when I got panic attacks over homework and papers.
In August, I read this quote below from Mary Oliver, and decided to prioritize meeting with “that wild, silky part” of myself. The baby went down for her first nap at 10am, and I opened my computer and wrote until she woke up.
Through this season I learned to hear the difference between Mind and personal mind. I learned to discern between creativity and my ego. The next few months completely changed my life.
I hope you enjoy this little vignette.
Love,
Gabi
P.S. “Method Writing” by Jack Grapes also helped me access my deep voice, alongside these lectures by Sydney Banks.
Bottom of the Well
If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet–one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere–there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different–it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other buy are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.
The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem–the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say–exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself–soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.
Why shouldn’t it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can life? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by–risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook.
I imagine an old well in a corner of a garden. One of those wells you’d see in a kitschy painting: old stones embedded with moss and grime, with a weathered wood roof. The well is deep, and you can’t see the bottom.
I’ve always been scared of deep, dark places. I think it started when I first heard about Jaws. I’m also scared of heights and falling. So scared, in fact, that it took me about 3 months for the queasy feeling in my stomach to stop when I laid in bed at night in our 4th floor apartment.
I’ve avoided this well because the bottom is so far, so deep, and so dark. Just imagining how deep and dark and damp it is at the bottom makes me shut my eyes tight, shudder, and think of something else.
When Mary Oliver referenced the dark, silky part of ourselves, I began to wonder if the bottom of the well wasn’t so scary after all.
The other night I had an image… the well isn’t that deep. The bottom is just out of sight, that’s all. And at the bottom it’s not dark. It’s actually a portal into deep space. I see an image that is some combination of one of the recent photos of deep space, with the sensation of speed portrayed in the bifrost in the Marvel movies.
Creativity is the experience of sticking my arm in that pulsing, rushing river of the universe, and seeing what I come up with. Energy wants to come through and take form in thought. There’s no scarcity of energy ready to pulse through into form. I become creatively blocked when I try to control it.
When I start out with an idea of how things should be or look, when I have an idea in my head and try to recreate it on the page, when I think whatever I’m doing needs to be commercially viable before I even go to the river to see what’s there, I stop creativity. I shut down that dark, silky part of myself.
There is only what wants to come through. I do not get a say in what comes through or how it comes through, or what it looks like when it is formed. I don’t get a say in how people respond to what comes through. I can simply show up and experience being a conduit. If I try to control anything about it, it won’t come through. It will simply be a dead artifact of ego and its discontents.
It feels scary to show up and accept whatever comes through. But I’m finally sick of the suffering that comes from being scared of the bottom of the well. I’m tired of resisting it. I miss the feeling of aliveness that comes from showing up and just feeling whatever comes through. And maybe, what other people think of what comes through simply isn’t my business.
Practical Wisdom 