Category Archives: Quotes

tracking Story through imaginal lands

January 27, 2014Creating meaning through writing, Quotes, writing as path to discoverycourage, James Hillman, Leslie Marmon Silko, mythic, poems, poetry, Story, writingWendy

I will tell you something about stories
(he said)
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
(he said)
Here, put your hand on it
See. It is moving.
There is life here
for the people.
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

– Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony)

* * * * * * * * * *
It’s an odd time we live in, relative to the time humanity’s been humanity. We’re different in the stories we tell, in our demand to be entertained. We don’t recognize stories as Story, we call them Truth or fiction (lies), we pick them up and drop them again. Our stories come and go so fast that we don’t learn them, we call them news. We learn to ignore them. It’s hard to see if ritual and ceremony are still “growing in the belly.”

Who passes down stories in families any more? I don’t mean family stories, per se, but stories of ourselves nonetheless. Maybe it’s a result of being a literate society, we find our stories in books. Or on TV. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but I think it causes us to think that deep stories are separate from ourselves – they have to be in print, on paper or pixels, in order to be meaningful. How much is memorable, though, in the end? Is there life “here, for the people”?

Meanwhile, among the small talk, we learn to tell small stories to ourselves about ourselves. My self-story, for some reason planted early into my psyche, was that my life had no story. That I was just a product of 1970s American suburban upbringing. Nothing to see here, move along.

“We are…less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us,” says James Hillman in The Soul’s Code.

But what about those of us whose childhoods seemed boring, fruitless, not full of trauma (real or imagined) except in how being given only the surface of things is traumatic? I think Hillman is right to say this, “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.” The 1970s and 80s, suburban sprawl, school days, highways – all imagined, all imaginal and as such, full of Story. I have long denied them their right, have denied meaningfulness out of distaste.

I think I write merely to find Story. Every story I tell, whether in fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drawing, is a search for a line, a thread of meaning, for something coherent. I believe that somewhere there must be signal in the noise.

As of today there are 6.8 million google hits for “I am a writer.” It’s the most commonplace thing in the world, it seems (almost one hit per ten existing human beings). Some writers become authors, some make a living at it. Some are entertainers, others keep their writings private (by choice or by inability to overcome the celebrity-to-crowd ratio). Part of me sees the rightfulness in there being many story tellers, many makers of Story, and in the proof that we’re all creative. Part of me quivers at what it perceives as my lack of imagination (to create) and gumption (to share, or to promote)), at the sense that this has to be a competition for market value. Oh dread.

Meanwhile, the thread holds and I keep writing, here, in journals, notebooks, computer files. Aren’t there enough words out in the world already? Maybe, but Story needs to be told.

***

I finished re-reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony yesterday and am encouraged to keep finding my own ways of telling stories – telling the story in the way it needs to be told, even if it’s not the way it would have been told in the “old days” IS the ritual and the ceremony that can heal and make whole.

I needed to be reminded.

***
What do you know about stories and Story?
Can you hear what it is we’re whispering to ourselves? Does our entertainment tell us something deeper about ourselves?
What stories about your life have you had to let go?
Do stories help?

***
image sources : Dominic Alves via Compfight
and Phoebe M-H via Compfight

I, where I turned, felt the enchantment

“The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things. I envied people who were “single-minded,” who had one powerful talent and who knew when they got up in the morning what it was they had to do. Whereas I, where I turned, felt the enchantment: to the window for the sweetness of the air; to the door for the passing figures; to the teapot, the typewriter, the knitting needles, the pets, the pottery, the newspaper, the telephone. Wherever I looked, I could have lived.

It took me half my life to come to believe I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad. My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering. I found myself at odds with the propaganda of our times. One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition. Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize. Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism — which claims either the hand or head as the seat of true power. One is supposed to concentrate and not to spread oneself thin, as the jargon goes. And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one’s freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free. Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower. Not to worry about which seeds sprout. But to give them as my gift in good faith.”

– M.C. Richards in Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person

***
related, in case you haven’t seen it, to this post.

…find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.

–Vincent van Gogh

—–

In a letter to his brother, Theo van Gogh London, January 1874

my image: evening in Amsterdam

I was, indeed, then in the dark and struggled on, unconscious of what I was seeking so earnestly; but I had a feeling of the right, a divining-rod that showed me where gold was to be found. — Goethe

my image: Cache Creek Nature Preserve on a very foggy morning

Write the Way to Love

I know it sounds odd, but lately I don’t know what I love. I mean I can name things I love, the things I’ve always loved, the things I’m supposed to, that which is obvious. But the truth is, there’s a kind of distance, a numbness, a too-busy-to-really-feel how I feel about much. Not a pathological dissociation, just a sense of going through the motions. I can put it down to being in a foreign country, to having willingly left a home I loved and entered another place* where I don’t know whether or not I belong, to being the go-to-person at home, to not being compelled enough to work on the (ideally) fulfilling work that I know, rationally, could give me a sense of purpose.

Tributes to Ray Bradbury were everywhere right after he died. I can’t really add anything that hasn’t already been said in gratitude for the pure happiness and play he brought to the world. Maybe his influence was too strong – to this day I hesitate to commit to important things, fearing my butterfly decisions will irrevocably change the world, my world, in unwanted ways. Then sometimes, I’m just bold. We up and move overseas, I plunge into something new.

I’m not intentionally going on a Bradbury-kick, but I’m hearing again the good advice he’s given:

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live by.

That is profound in every way and I’m a struggling disciple.

This month I’ve made a commitment to write something every day – ideally fiction, so I can disabuse myself of the notion that I’ve got no stories to tell, but realistically it can all be experimental, slice-of-life, whatever. Not journal writing/ranting, not blog posts, but snippets or more of a scene, an event, a location, and something happening, something I love, even if it’s just the floating wooden puzzle box from last night’s dream that’s the only thing I love at this moment. Put it in, get it written.

I know I love light through leaves. I started there.

—
* stories for another time – my extended stay in Thailand and the moves to China to Germany…

Writing, Spirit and Courage

June 9, 2012Creating meaning through writing, Quotes, writing as path to discoverycourage, marginalia, sacredness, Stephen Harrod Buhner, writing, writing as spiritual practiceWendy

I believe writers must travel into wilderness and bring back what they find, envelop it in words, and release it into the world. I believe that is their ecological function and without that renewal human culture deteriorates. I believe in the sacredness and the necessity of the art.. –Stephen Harrod Buhner

I once had an acquaintance who derided me for not being into physically adventurous things. Nevermind that I am physically active, was once a competitive swimmer and practiced aikido – if I wasn’t mountain biking or rock climbing or alternately throwing myself down mountains on skis, I was missing out, I was not “edge” enough.

Now, I may not be the most courageous of folks (evidenced by my inability/unwillingness to scathe him with a witty comeback) but as someone who wrings every assumption out through writing, who is willing to go deep and look directly at my life, find what’s at the center and what can be brought back in beautiful form, I have to say that Buhner’s reminder gives me more courage to explore a different wilderness. An equally dangerous one.

I know I hang back even though I try not to. I know I am not doing the daring things that might be possible. But I’m at least willing to stand on the threshold and enter, open-eyed.

I am a practicant of this sacred and necessary art, but I have not earned any right to claim ecological or cultural significance. I understand the importance of bringing a gift back from your journey, something to heal your community, something to nourish those who have nourished you.* Maybe it’s better to not know that, though, because it contributes to “pressure to produce.” Something that makes it less likely that anything will come of a novice’s attempts to to use writing as a spiritual practice.

—
Quote from: Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life.

* a la Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey

Image source: Trey Ratcliff via Compfight