“Don’t write today from your experience of writing yesterday.”
– Laraine Herring, The Writing Warrior
When I stand in a bookstore and wonder whether or not a book belongs to me, I take a breath, open the book and let it tell me something. I love this moment of possible connection so much that to me it feels like a prayer.
Mark and I went to Glastonbury last week (if you’ve never been, come visit me and we’ll go together!) In The Speaking Tree, I absently ran my fingers over the spines of all of the gentle, spiritual supportive titles, not feeling a great pull to any of them until: “Me,” The Writing Warrior whispered. “I am who you are looking for.”
I pulled it off off the shelf, feeling a bit uncomfortable. The word warrior felt scary but energetic. Pause. Breathe. Open. Read.
“Don’t write today from your experience of writing yesterday.”
Reading that sent electric sparks through my body.
Everything I do seems to be tethered to the past. Nostalgia and history are my mode of operation in so many ways. I don’t write how I want to write because of reactions I have had in the past. I do things because they have always been done that way before. I haven’t followed the whisperings of my heart because they do not relate to anything I have seen someone else do.
I worry about committing to my path because of the way other people have walked theirs.
Honestly? I have been afraid of who I could become. What if you don’t like me anymore? What if what is in my heart clamouring to come out makes me so weird that there is no coming back to normal life? Writing about the sacred as I feel it is so much easier than letting the sacred out.
And who am I to write it anyway?
I am going to try to put all of that down and show up at the page.
“Don’t write today from your experience of writing yesterday.”
Deep breath. Pause. Write.
Here goes nothing.
xo
When I was a teen-ager I decided I wanted to do yoga. Typically, rather than go to a class I read a book about it. The book I chose told me all about the diet and the philosophy and it freaked me out. Be a vegetarian? Meditate? At 16? You might as well have asked me to go to Mars. What would people think?
I am in the middle of a life-long love affair with books. As I type, I am surrounded by a riotous bookshelf, a shorter cubby-hole of precious volumes, and at least three piles of books on the floor of my office that have not yet found permanent homes. I’m so obsessed that my husband had to intervene a few years ago when the postman started making cracks about us keeping Amazon afloat.