One of my teachers told me that before you can find your voice, you have to identify your purpose and I realised that that is where I have been going astray of late. I thought I was lacking inspiration or motivation, but the truth is that I had wandered off course. A friend had even sent me a text in which he’d written “off course” – he meant “of course” but I feel such errors are indeed Freudian, they are messages from the collective psyche.
I’ve been off course. I have been trying to emulate the people I admire, rather than simply trying to be more me. I’m not a nature writer. I have neither the knowledge nor the passion. I’m not an intellectual poet. I have neither the immersion nor the dedication. So why waste my time trying to follow in those footsteps?
And I know it’s a sacrilegious statement, but I am not pursuing fame or fortune or the ‘respect’ of the community. I’m not interested in the business of writing, because – hand on heart – I really cannot be bothered.
I know. That’s shocking, and it ill-serves the writers who are serious about their work and want to make a living at it and are so poorly served by the publishing world as it is.
I am sorry. And I am not sorry. I wish it were better for those writers, but I claim my own right to send my words out into the wild, freely.
When I step back from what everyone else is doing, I step closer to what I want to do.
I write from the heart. It is that simple. But here’s a thing: my life is not full of trauma and drama. I have no back-story. I have already written my way through my bereavement and now, on the other side of that, I have found a quiet kind of adventure, an adventurous kind of contentment, which is even more challenging to write. Anger and pain and trauma and hurt and abuse and desolation and despair all write themselves once you pick up the pen and become willing to bleed. I know. I have done it.
But calm, content, gentle wandering and wondering…these feel more challenging to put on the page. Who wants to read ‘happy’?
There are plenty who want you to tell them ‘how to be happy’– but the thing is, there is no quick fix. I cannot tell anyone how they can be happy. I want to say I can’t even tell you how I got here, but if you go back to my first posts, and patiently read all the way through, maybe it’s in there, maybe the ‘how’ I have lived my way to here is already on the page. Maybe not.
And maybe that's useful...but I think more useful is the bigger piece around what it really means to be happy, and by happy I don't mean super-joyful (those are only moments) I mean content, grateful for the abundance of "enough-ness", having many more good days and than bad ones, and finding the good even in the grotty days, and recognising how much agency and choice you have at your disposal and taking responsibility for the things you did or didn't do that could have made a day better than it was. I mean choosing to focus on the good stuff, because it is far more happy-making than over-focus on the bad, the fear, the anger.
I’m not going to lie, I still have my moments. By “moments” I mean hours, sometimes days, of woe-is-me stuff. I mean that my journal is as full of whinges as it is of gratitude. But the key thing I have worked out is that those are just moods. The underlying current is deep gratitude, deep contentment, deep love for the life I have and the people I choose to have in it and the work I choose to do.
Maybe that’s the one of the big distinctions that changes a mindset: recognise a mood for what it is and let it pass: recognise the deeper feeling and work with that.
My deeper current has been asking for re-wilding. I am writing around this idea of ‘the wild’, especially 'the wild inside'. I wrote a poem about ‘finding my wild’. I got feedback on it. I am rewriting it. Is there a contradiction in that? Maybe.
Meanwhile…I have recognised that re-wilding my writing means getting back to just writing from the heart. Forget knowledge. Forget technique. Just splurge. Remove the obvious to get to the meaningful, as someone said, or – the other way about – recognise the meaningful in the obvious.
It is said that squirrels plant thousands of trees every year simply by forgetting where they buried their acorns. I wonder if I can copyright “Lost Acorns” as the title for a book I will never get around to writing. It occurs to me that every prose piece or poem I put out into the wild is a forgotten acorn, that may grow into a tree I will never see. I will never know who it might shelter. I will never know who will feed from its future fruit. I will never know how tall it might grow, how old, how it will enjoy the sun or weather the storms.
I see the saplings. Sometimes someone will talk to me about something I wrote that I have long since forgotten, and I go back to seek it out…like a squirrel with half a memory of digging somewhere here-abouts. Such saplings are the validation of my purpose.
They say that squirrels plant a thousand trees simply by forgetting where they buried their acorns – but how do we know? How can we be sure, that those squirrels aren’t cannier than we give them credit for. Maybe their small brains simply exclude all the unnecessariness of a human way of being and focus on what’s important: acorns to eat now, acorns to store for this winter coming, acorns to plant to grow new trees. How can we be sure that they forget? Or know that such forgetting is not wholly deliberate?
So maybe I am just as wild as a squirrel. Forgetful and/or intentional in burying my acorns out in the world.
I come back to the word “wild” – untamed – unbound – and realise that it doesn’t necessarily mean tempestuous or rampaging. A violet, a primrose, an oak, a willow, the turkey tail growing on the old beech stump, these too are wild things. My wildness might manifest as a howling wolf (as I say, I have my moments) but it may also be a shore-washed weed. Wild can be still. And small. It can be as soft as silken moss on an ancient wall.
It occurs to me that “What kind of wild am I today?” might be a lovely way to start (or end) a day. It could be question for every day, in order to remind myself that I am always wild…but different kinds of wild. Am I wolf, or gull, or lynx, or fox, or butterfly? I am all of these and none. I am as wild as the moon, as a mountain, growing and/or diminishing imperceptibly by the day. I have had my volcano years, the explosive ones, and now I stand more quietly with nothing left to prove.
Wildness is the willingness to be still. Heron. Kingfisher. Watching. Waiting.
Wildness is spindrift and wind-blown seed. Wild does not tame itself. Wild blooms where it is.
So on the day I wrote this and asked myself "what kind of wild am I today?" I answered: the foraging kind. A boar in theforest. A mole in the earth.
I am formidable. And I am tiny.
I am snuffling about in the dark – and finding treasures to feast upon.
