The Spirit of Writing

Anais Nin wrote,“We write to taste life twice”. This certainly is how it feels to me. An evocative experience revisited often blooms with delights not fully perceived the first time around. Whether an encounter occurs in my outer or inner worlds, through putting words on the page, my experience of it deepens.

Too often I move through my days in a manner that prevents a fullness of experience. My attention is divided, my schedule busy, my emotions jangled. When I write, I slow down. The process of moving from word to word, idea to idea, paragraph to paragraph leads me beneath the surface waters to a deeper awareness.

Oftentimes I come to my keyboard with only the vaguest notion of what will appear. I type out a sentence or two, a few ideas. Gradually, subtly, a shift occurs. The words draw breath. A thought calls to me and as I follow, new possibilities appear. I search my thesaurus for the perfect verb, and words I find there reveal fresh and beckoning avenues.

A liveliness, an aliveness, takes form~~and shifts and morphs and grows until, before I know it, a completed piece exists. The original impulse has taken wing and flown, through various shifts and permutations, into new worlds.

Writing is a rich, organic process. The original idea, experience, or sentiment evolves, in tune with its own nature, into a form I often could not have anticipated.

And so, while writing does allow me to taste life twice, it becomes so much more than that. Through the process, I approach the creative force that lies at the heart of life itself.

Writing feels relational. When I create with words, I touch something and am touched in return. Though I don’t claim to have any more than a fleeting acquaintance, what it feels like is that, at these moments, I come into contact with the smallest smidgeon of the vast Mystery.

In other words, writing is a spiritual experience.

I maintain an active meditation practice. I touch Spirit in my work as a psychotherapist. I sense the Sacred within the natural world. And I write. All are ways of opening myself to the Divine.

We create children or art or workshops or meals. We stand in awe of autumnal sunlight dancing on leaves of gold or stars as they circle in an inky blackness. We kneel for the Eucharist, read from sacred texts, chant in a sweat lodge. We look into the eyes of loved ones or grieve our loss of them. The avenues to Spirit are endless, as Spirit is endless. Points of contact are ever present as Spirit is ever present.

It is said that a kitten sees the toy in everything. As human folk we would be wise to see the Spirit in everything~~in each molecule and every experience. A richness is there, whether or not we recognize it. However, by practicing an active receptivity, we welcome a vitality that enlivens us and brings a profound immediacy to all our experience.

Blessings!

Loanne Marie