Do our words protect us from what we need to see?

Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.

What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.

Like life, revisions really are the hard part

Over and over again...yes, you need to do that, no matter how much your brain is shutting down at times.

You have to do this hard part. You need to go over the same pages - again and again and again. You have to.

Seldom does it get put down in finished form from the beginning. That's the nature of the beast - the writing beast, and then life, too. Requires practice - this business of creative writing, this business of living.

You sense what is either wrong, or at least not quite right, what gets off balance, what, when read by someone else, doesn't quite convey the intended meaning. Or the phrasing was awkward, or you lost a sense of perspective and put something there important to you perhaps, but not at all to a reader. Or you lost the thread, or thread(s) of the narrative because you got distracted, or absorbed somewhere that sent you off center.

Writing is not an even process...

Well, that declaration is nothing new. I have struggled with a regular writing schedule for a month now. That's nothing new either. It has to do with writers needing to do something else to make a living... which is just sad. I mean, there are the lucky few, but most of us struggle along trying to do creative writing at the edges of all the things we need to do to pay our bills, right?

There are many unkind realities of the U.S. culture, and this is one of them.

Okay, but the other thing is getting to this point in the book-writing where I had to clarify for myself once again what this really is. I think I let too much come in from outside to steer me off course at times.

Part of this is my own difficulty in naming the genre (why does this culture so insist on putting things in easy-to-relate-to boxes?). I keep calling it my more-than-memoir, but the use of that genre word has tended to have others put the book in a genre-box, or for my critique group to sometimes expect something from it that was not my real intention.

Beginning again...

That's one of the wonderful things about this life, if you are not too attached to identity, personal history (or, baggage), career, beliefs - you can begin again - over and over and over. Evolution continues to create and recreate life over millions and millions of years. Why not mine?

Star formation. Chandra: NASA

Of course, this also means dying over and over again, letting go what no longer works, what no longer fits, what no longer describes or provides narrative for what we learn as we go along in life. It means not clinging to belief systems when those systems have cracked open at the foundations under the weight of new discoveries, new realizations, new unfolding...

I just try to open these days, more and more. It's hard right now because it means opening to some shattering truths about where this species seems headed, the damage we're doing, the deepening of suffering as a defining reality of our times. On the other hand, I see no other way to address that suffering at its causes. If we don't go to the source - and it is, indeed, a harsh journey - we can't get to the place where suffering ceases.