Using inquiry to allow time and space to open knowing…
Photo courtesy of: ‘Into The Mist’ by Mikko Lagerstedt
http://www.mikkolagerstedt.com/alone
I compose (in part) in my head, an activity I do best over time, not that I’m that great at it. When I do this, it allows my heartfelt intent to call forth aspects from depths that discursive thinking usually skims over. When an insight seems to ‘dawn’ on me, it is usually associated with an inquiry I’ve been considering. In that dawning there may be great clarity and openness. If I decide to write it down, I must contextualize it, and that begins the series of choices and decisions that narrow and particularize how to approach what I want to say, as well as the manner in which I think will best express the meaning of that insight. The great challenge in particularizing any open insight is to try and maintain as much of the openness and clarity of its original dawning.
Trying to look deeper… What does it mean to write something? What is involved with creating the ‘said’? In either case there may be an intent to convey something felt with words, but how does the ‘specific’ come to the conscious surface? Where does the felt connect to the expression? I watch this intently. Somehow emptiness begets form, feeling earns content, the not-relevant is discounted and the fitting becomes worthy… Entering into open mindspace with anticipation, a trusting and growing confidence that the sense of self will not be irretrievably lost, as habitual benchmarks of identity and location are relinquished, which allows nanoseconds of limpidity, of being the knowing, of loving the exquisite awareness of this aliveness… Writing is the manifestation of the continuum of the open question…as words rise to the occasion…love of their embodied origin expands fullness as I inquire, even with nothing particular to say, only to peek into that knowing…which is not so much a ‘look’ as it is BEING the openness…
Ingredients: Early coffee, functional breath (however ragged that breath may be), a shard of a feeling, at least a fragment of a thought or word, but if not that last, a bemused disposition to listen to the beating heart, those last words shock me, sort of like putting a shoulder into a yielding wall, and having that wall fold over to become an entry point or way into a quiet morning’s garden, not Yeats’s bee loud glade, no, not that, not yet, and it’s the edge of the not yet that thrills me, leads me to take another step, into a space where a breeze blows a robe of words, a cloak of sounds that wrap my moving body as I do what dance I can, a dance of age in a springtime realm, a song sung and a fall down among the sweet blooms, beneath the blue sky.
I think of my way of writing as proceeding in the opposite direction from how you have described your experience. I discover what I am thinking (and if lucky even discover a few insights along the way) by just beginning to write something or other. But since everything to do with consciousness seems to flow in both directions, the direction may be incidental.
Your experience reminds me of Paul Valery, who said that in writing a poem one is always engaged in an act of translation (from the ineffable to an inadequate expression of it).
It doesn’t seem familiar to me that I am ever in the position of trying to find inadequate words to give voice to some vibrant vision or mysterious illumination.
For instance yesterday evening I attended a very interesting event at the local Turkish center, at which an acquaintance read from her new novel and then a Franciscan nun talked about how woman around the world (whom she had met) are the ones who suffer the most yet are the best defenders of our planet. Now I find myself wanting to write something that will explore the relationship between inner understanding and caring for the planet, between self and the world which the self finds itself inhabiting (to paraphrase a striking phrase I just read in Love of Knowledge, Page 37).
My hope is that I will stumble upon a way to allow thoughts and feelings to weave something coherent in words, a coherence that will only arise in the act of weaving from threads that arise on their own.
I thought this article was eminently relevant to what I was ‘scratching’ at…
https://tricycle.org/magazine/calligraphers-apprentice/