In my bright, shiny, anticipated, glowy one-on-one writing course with Shira Ehrlichman, I'm being encouraged to trust the words. Shira continually steers me towards writing visually. A big breakthrough from reading Aracelis Girmay's poem, "Here." She writes:
"Here is your brother
in the backseat, sounding like he is drowning.
Here is his face pressed to the window.
Here is his wet face. Here is the near-quiet of the car.
Here is your stomach filled up with ocean.
Here is your Jurassic sadness. That’s all."
Whoa.
OK. Girmay didn't write, "I was sad & overwhelmed," did she? Right. Show, don't tell.
I'm repeatedly finding my control freak tendencies leaking into my writing. It's.My.Story! I will tell you how I feel! I will tell you what to feel!
Well. That's simply uninteresting writing. That shows a profound lack of faith in the reader.
I've been writing visually; that is, using words to paint portraits and scenes. That's a poem, right? A microcosm. Your face pressed against the glass. The immediacy is sort of poetry's seduction. Shira invited me to return to an era, present being an option, and describe it like a still life. I found it so challenging because I didn't know the why. (Pretty much the point, control freak. Let it go!) I let the images tumble one after the other. I felt like the result was a throwaway, but other readers strenuously disagreed.
I'm flexing this muscle. Today, Shira and I had our weekly session. While checking in I shared coming up against that same resistance to let go and trust the words. Shira urged me to trust the words a bit, to loosen the reins, and free up the expression. It was one of those, "Yeah, and!" conversations where we continued to spark one another, took notes while the other talked. As she gave me her prescription, I realized she was asking me to be more intuitive. I told her about a book I read years ago called "The Gift of Fear." The book's premise is that intuition, our gut, is unprocessed information. The author is sharing this so that we'll all trust our intuition more and maybe protect ourselves from dangerous situations. It also recasts intuition as the knowledge we haven't intellectually processed. For example, we may feel suspicious of the guy offering to carry our bags. We don't know why so our intellect might downplay the feeling and say, "don't be rude, accept help." However, the feeling might be a response to the quickly gained awareness that the guy has no grocery bags of his own and we didn't see him leave the store.
Poetry is often a playground for feelings. It stands to reason that feelings, unprocessed knowledge, wants an outlet that isn't linear. Have faith. Let it out.
I had a conversation with a friend recently about some challenges in my work. She said, "always trust your gut."
Last month, Jivamukti Yoga made the koshas, or layers of Self, the Focus of the Month. Apart from being a physical being, energetic, and intellectual, we are said to have an intuitive layer: vijnamaya kosha. I taught several classes about vijnamaya kosha specifically. As I read source texts, translations, and analysis, I'm continually taught that we need to live in every aspect of our being but not get stuck there. The idea is that our essential Self is beyond these layers. I am a body but I am also eternal. I am my intellect but I am also eternal. If I am not my intuition, then this layer gains a power over me, rather than being an equal aspect of my experience.
Let it go. Let it out. Let.
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