Writing from the Inside Out (2 page)

As a writer, I seek moments when phrases turn and images emerge and resonate. The result can't be anticipated. It is free-form writing. Just as yoga is not a means to a preconceived end — it is a practice to deepen devotion and transcend the self — so, too, can writing be. I also refer to this free-form approach as prose poetry — a mode of writing that feels like poetry even when it doesn't look like a poem.

Creativity is a continual and ongoing process, happening both inside and outside of me, intellectually and physically; nature is expressed all the time through all forms. Prose poetry asks that I live aware of this continual dreaming, whether I am writing or not. At the end of life, I will realize: There could be no greater gift than to have this sense of self. I am here in this moment in which one phrase turns into another; life's end may turn out much the same — one thing becoming another. My past conditioning, favorable or unfavorable, serves me, and my life's work pulls me forward. I am drawn to the images and experiences enacted by words for a reason that becomes more resolved in each moment.

The more open I am to what can emerge from my efforts, the better my ability is to make distinctions. A universal image resonates through all things, leaving no part out. As a writer who is writing, I resonate with that image, departing for the claim of thought or phrase, returning to find the moment fresh and lucid. By honoring the nuances of creativity that could appear to be nonessential, I am authentic to the circumstances that led me here, and so I create well, and I live in line with nature.

 

 

Beyond what gets written, poetry exists in sense experience, in everyday attention. There is a functional approach to living, whereby I go about driven by the things I have to do — too many responsibilities, day-to-day labors — and then there is the approach to life where I face the music. Outward forms change. Inward forms change. Life is full when I am roused by the desire to create.

As a writer, I find that this desire to create means tending the creative fields and harvesting the phrases that are presented to me. Mostly, it means being truly and deeply satisfied that there is always
more than enough
. In the present moment, magic always happens; creating work that reaches into the flow of this magic is its own fulfillment. When creativity smiles on my efforts, the result is a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

The challenge would appear to be how to sustain my efforts in the face of all the stuff life hands me. The issue is more fundamental — it is
why
rather than
how
. The path finds me at the convergence of my natural abilities, what serves the world, and what I adore. Often, the trick is not so much finding time but finding heartspace to be productive and creatively effective. Poetry can live in many forms, but it won't come to the forefront if my heart is not in it. I disappear when I am devoted to my craft, sweating with the labor of love.

The creative moment is always the present one. The air I breathe is my call to action. It gives me the material I need to do my job, which is to stretch mindfully through corridors of prolonged weirdness and uncertainty to give voice to image. By unkinking doubt to embrace greater negative capability, I find better modes of organization.

One of the great wonders of my life is that I prioritize backwards, with art saved for later, after the bills are paid, after my world seems secure. More wonderful than this process is witnessing the self truly dripping with artistic creation. Living wholeheartedly, I devote my time, energy, my body — such as it is — to rendering forms that echo the truth of the soul — all with no promised external reward and no reality-anchor, except the love of pursuit — and, at times, no stability whatsoever but the momentum of continual practice.

Poetry is essential to society even when it is not functional — which is usually the case. In society, poetry conveys our myths, lives in every gesture and symbol, enacts compelling stories, and interacts with forms of beauty that nudge the sublime. Poetry calls the soul to express the sound of the world beyond. Poetry is to imagination what meditation is to attention.

If ideas are understood to have a life of their own, art and poetry are the ethical stewardship of those ideas. This stewardship is magnetic. There's the sensation of being drenched in creative juices. Sometimes it feels like the quality of light in early springtime: afternoon with a slight breeze. I am outside, looking at the trees swaying in the light, and everything feels and looks natural; everything wears all-natural fibers. The pergola is wood — it feels alive. The roof is bamboo thatch, and a vine grows up it. The buds of fruit have started; they've just begun to enter this world from the domain of infinite possibility, the other side of things in the here-and-now. I've just awoken from a surprisingly restful nap. Red wine was involved beforehand. Before that was a good bout of manual labor in the garden. I'm in love. What woke me from the nap was the footfall of a bird exploring the front deck, pecking for seeds dropped from the crust of whole-grain bread. The golden light of sunshine has entered everything — sunlight filters through the screen door. It lights up the unassuming brown of the bird's feathers, revealing blue and golden hues. I feel seen but entirely unjudged — the bird has its eye on me, but all of my qualities don't enter the picture. I am a created thing, and what I signify to the bird feels as valid as anything for which I could ever strive. A towel swings in the breeze, drying — it's older than I am; my mother dried me with it before I had been capable of such things. Sunlight shines through its fibers, lighting it up and coloring its shadows.

Sometimes it's all too much to keep up with; I'm in the flow and outside of it. My senses are flooded, on the verge of being overwhelmed — too good to be true, too much to handle, and yet they continue to waterfall: ideas, good ideas, and in more or less the right order. I'm in a rushing stream, moving nimbly, chaotically — and the nearer I get to the verge of complete disaster — crashing into a boulder, plunging into a whirlpool, catapulting onto dry land — the more maddening it is as I see how luck favors me, and the way I end up going turns out to be the right way. One split-second decision follows another, and another, and there's no turning back, only the thrill of getting lost on the path I've been presented. My fuel, frighteningly, is inexhaustible. The roar of waves and of my own full-tilt breath converge at the summit of what I hear.

Sometimes I have to fall asleep before the real unconscious work can happen. A mathematician's trick is to pose short-term memory at the apex of an unsolved problem, and then take a nap. While asleep, the brain does work for which the conscious mind usually doesn't have the resources. A simple departure into the imagination links two worlds. Beyond reverie is a realm where things appear very different and have nothing of the stability or persistence of physical objects in the here-and-now. Time moves across a different span; there are no natural rules and laws — not so much anyway. Math plays around in the land of unlimited resources. It is enlivening to bring it more into communion with the iceberg of this waking world, where commerce and routine speak loudly against the unconscious. I must be certain that a dollar bill is not folded into an origami swan when paying for parking. And, in this sphere, a finite number of dollar bills is available to me. How would things be different if that were not the observable truth? This is the stuff of dreams and of imagination, very unlike the life of presumed certainty.

What would life be like if I gave up everything and attended only to the few things that provide me with the most charge? If I minimized my faith in the redemptive aspects of the wellcommerced life, the full-time job, the hope for retirement, and acted creatively on the page and amid it all? If I prioritized quality of life based on a rich attention span and a sense of communion with the naturally imaginative world?

I want no one to delay his or her work that is an expression of oneness. For me, the only right way to live is the way that has poetry at its center. The word “poetry” has its roots in the ancient Greek word
poiesis,
a verb that means “to make.” Poetry is the path of authentic articulation; this life works to express the wisdom and sublime beauty of union between the self and wild nature.

The life that embraces uncertainty worships the unmanifest as it takes form. The poetry that is mine depends on what shapes my motivation. It is good to be ambitious — yet I do a bit of a disservice to the creative impulse by claiming my predispositions as though I consciously formed them. The craft of writing enters my life; I am grateful. It fits and challenges me. I invite it more intimately into my life than any other pursuit and adopt it as a practice. Trying it out becomes commitment, and then a dance, as it takes me for a ride as much as the other way around. The relationship itself governs what happens. Acting spontaneously — whether tightly or loosely — is the poetry of the moment.

Poetry holds a unique position among the arts. It emerges as a material or energetic presence, but is without physical form. When shaping a poem, I'm not shaping anything but words on a page and phrases in the rhythm of thought. Take sculpture as an example: There's a stone, and I carve away at the stone; or, there's a bit of wire, and I bend the wire. Take music as an example. There's an instrument, and I relate to the instrument in a way that produces vibrations. With poetry, there's no paint, but there is an image. No two objects are striking each other, yet there is resonance. The resonance comes from the way we engage with language; it's from the words, their texture and connotation, and from the friction of experience.

What I celebrate when I love poetry is not entirely the written or spoken word. Rather, I celebrate language through the words; I celebrate the quality of attention that makes a poem. I celebrate the imagination as organized by a body. I celebrate my relationship to language, and how words reunite me with imagination and wonder.

I take language to be my instrument, and language shapes me as much as I interact with it. The words I use come to me. They are an offering from the imagination. The real art of poetry is in what occurs prior to locating the foothold offered by having acquired language. In that place of constantly varying music, we behold the incarnation of the original image. In the moment, the coiled rope is also the serpent, whether it is later to be beheld as serpent or rope. All is recognized to be numinous and alive. Prior to hearing language's footfall, I am in the domain of spirits, whether I believe I am or not.

At its essence, practicing poetry or free-form writing means being curious, giving some shape to enlivening patterns of thought without building a framework of undue familiarity. Instead, I grow a winding lattice of curiosity. Something drives me to a certain kind of work. And so I do it. Periodically, I check in to see what is happening based on my efforts.

In the way of inspiration, the most I can ever do is create the place for it to happen. I can't light the spark, but I can create the dry and fragrant kindling, say. I can put myself in a position where
it
is absolutely bound to happen — though it isn't possible to say beforehand
how
it will happen, or
what
will happen.

Getting ideas and having a clear purpose is primarily an energetic phenomenon. It doesn't all happen in the mind — it goes beyond that. The mind is basically a switching station for the elements of sense perception. Working with the body means working with the mind; most often, the mental work is just the tip of the iceberg of what's going on energetically. Doing yoga and doing what's right for the body is part of being a responsible steward of one's energy. I happen to be me in this moment, by way of appearances, by the way elements perform of their own accord.