For a while, I haven’t written. I wondered why. Nothing seemed compelling enough to write about. OK, actually no ideas were coming at all.
Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write…ask yourself…must I write?”
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic, writes, “Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form…driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.” p. 64 She goes on to say, you can say “no” when an idea comes, but it will move on to someone else.
So I waited, trying to be alert to what might offer itself to me. One morning, the words started to come. I understood, at least for me, my writing. And, I started letting it happen.
WRITING
You write where you are
Not where you are forever,
Just where you are
in this nanosecond.
Words flow through, Spirit, waiting to play.
To give voice to the words
that comes through you.
Traveling fast, as if sent
urgently from a distant place.
The ones that pay a surprise visit
as you’re about to fall asleep; the ones
urging you to write them down, to
hold them to a page so they can’t fly off.
Sometimes you think them
too bold for print, you fear
what others might say.
Still, you write the words.
A understanding, a phrase…
not for forever, just for right now
for this nanosecond
for this poem.
besliter, January, 2017
OH, thank you!
A kind of writing I love to read is when the writing brings me into the nanosecond that it was written in and for. I can feel you in the present moment when you wrote this. (well, I make that up, I don’t know what is true!)
That is a wonderful compliment. Thank you!
Thanks, Barbara. That ‘s why we find it so satisfying when we finally do it. Or in this case, read someone else’s words.
It is satisfying, isn’t it. Thanks Jenny.
I am so glad you got clear and still enough to hear the words you got for writing. I like the urgency you refer to twice when the writing comes up from within. It is like a public proclamation and you are the “town cryer” who is trusted to communicate it to necessary people. The natural inspiration I get when reading what you write is energizing and I feel eager to sit with my body and hear what “comes up”. This writing you are doing and inspiring others to do grounds us in truth and lets us feel the power that is gifted to us from within our own souls. That clear purpose for being here is what keeps me sane. Living love. Thank you.
Your are welcome. Thanks.