In the animal medicine traditions of the nine directions, that which is ‘within’ is that which guides the heart’s joy, the pathway to personal truth and the protection of one’s own sacredness.
The ‘small joy’ that I pulled from my jar this morning asked me to honour the Turkey within.
When I sought out my totem animals a few years ago, I found Turkey within. Today, I went back to the cards and on a random shuffle, I again pulled Turkey. It is time to pay attention to my own sacred practices.
Turkey medicine is that of the saints and mystics, that of service. I am no saint and cannot claim mysticism either. Perhaps I am more the scribe in the dark corner, making copies, sharing the wisdom of those who have gone before. Perhaps I am also the scribe who finds spare parchment and ink and stays behind in the dark to make slip-in pages of her own opinions. I am certainly the scribe who will try to slip out unnoticed, while deeply hoping that some of the words land where they are needed.
I dare to call it sacred: this simple act of threading words on an invisible strand. Beads to be thumbed and passed over. Memories to be caught in spider-silk, and cast to the winds. Ideas. Thoughts. Once-was, might-be, things. I dare to tell you these things matter in a world that is too caught up in trying to prove right over wrong, power and greed. All the stories matter. Even our own.
Among other things, I’m working on my Dad’s ship stories. Mostly this is typing and lightly editing his notes and interjecting my own memories and thoughts. I’m not sure what shape the thing will eventually have or whether anyone else will ever read it. Maybe my own voice will disappear from the final version, maybe not.
At the same time, I’m reading Kathleen Jamie (Surfacing; Findings, Cairn) What she’s teaching me – among other things – is how much work I will have to do on One Ship, once I’ve got it down.
Listening to her voice, somewhere behind it, I hear the honing and shaping of my own. I know that the stories I’m capturing, preserving, are being told too clumsily, but I have to get it all down because I’m not sure which details matter. I have to get it all down because I’m a novice at long-form work. I have no experience at ditching the research in order to tell the story. I don’t even know what the story is, not really, not yet. Am I telling my Dad’s story, retelling a place in time, or am I looking for something else?
Am I just clinging to a fragment of my deeper past because I have only ancestors, no descendants?
Or is it simpler than that? Am I perhaps still just asking my Dad to teach me stuff?
I know that the people that I miss most, I most miss because I no longer have those "did you know?" conversations. That curiosity and excitement at discovering new-to-me or new-to-them stuff – that is a serious gap in my life at the moment. I have teachers and guides, but not the close-connected ones who bounce in with a new random fact that sends us into debates and investigations for no reason other than wanting to know more. And no-one that wants me to do the same, with the same enthusiasm for the follow-up over days or weeks, the circling back is missing. Is missed.
Perhaps that’s another reason for writing. Maybe I’m just bounding onto your page like Tigger (or skulking like Eeyore, because I know I do that too), because I’ve just found something out and want someone – anyone – to think Oh…that’s interesting.
This week’s rabbit hole was the concepts of twilight. Did you know about civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight? I did not…and am delighted that I now do.
Just to remind my future self, or to anchor it more firmly in my brain, I am going to put down here that it is to do with the number of degrees which the sun is below the horizon (at both dawn and dusk) – naught to six, six to twelve, twelve to eighteen, in case you’re interested. Between eighteen at one end of the day and the beginning of the next is defined as ‘night’ – proper darkness. By coincidence, I’ve just read Jamie’s take on how we have corrupted darkness into being the cover for evil, when in fact it is the place where all life begins. I know what she means.
I remember my first experience of full dark, on campsite in Wales. Lying in my sleeping bag, awake in the night, listening to the stream just beyond the trees that were just behind the tent. Borth. I remember the river and the bridge and the house beyond. I would have been maybe ten or twelve years old. A movement of my own sent out a spark of static from the cheap nylon sleeping bag, caught my attention. I was astonished that beyond that split-second spark, I could see nothing. No shadows beyond the tent walls, no tent walls, no camp bed next to mine, not even my own, no floor. The sparking sleeping bag that I knew to be blue on the outside and amber within, had disappeared. I brought my hand up to my face, because that’s the saying isn’t it? “Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” I was unnerved to discover the truth of that: in full dark you only know your hand is there inches away from your eyes because some other part of your brain tells you so. Your eyes are shrugging their metaphorical shoulders.
All of this ties back to Dad. The investigation of twilight came about because of a passage where he talks of it lasting well past midnight at a latitude where I thought that unlikely. I set out to find out what time the sun would have set in that place at that time of year, which led to other stories as these things do.
Perhaps I write because without it, what need would I have of rabbit holes down which to fall?
Like any writer who cares about the work, I am trying to become better at the art and craft of it. I read a lot about writing. I go to workshops. But I don’t analyse other writers’ work. We’re told we should do that, read like a writer, but I hated doing it in school, and I’m not enamoured of the practice now. I understand the theory, but personally, I prefer to immerse myself in the writers that drag me under, and trust that I will learn what it is about what they do that appeals to me and absorb some of it by osmosis. Besides, I suspect most of the authors I read, would prefer me to read like a reader.
Writers and artists are like circus performers and magicians and shamans: they want us to be awed, not to figure out how it's done. Maybe there is still the child in me that doesn't want to know that it is all smoke and mirrors, that prefers to believe in magic. And art.
My tai chi teacher advises against "slicing and dicing, cutting and measuring and weighing; you have to feel your way in," he tells me. I think it is the same with writing. We are drawn to the writers who have something about their tonality or resonance or construction that is akin to what we are trying ourselves to birth. It’s not about copying, more about understanding the rhythms that work, the melodies that sing to us (and may not do so to others). It’s about those faint echoes of a song we’re trying catch.
And yes, be honest, it is also about all those images and metaphors we wish we’d stumbled upon before they did. And being even more honest, for me it is also about wishing I had the courage to follow the literal paths they have walked, to go out into the wilds, meet the people, do the work.
I could never do the kind of writing I thought I wanted to do because, while I could get myself to some of the awesome places – I have indeed done so – the fact of my character is that I am too timid to then strike up the necessary conversations, to go it alone and risk life and limb. Or at least sanity and safety.
This, then, is the limit of all the books and classes and workshops on ‘how’ to write. It is all based on how other people write, not how you will. Not how I will. It is useful information. It is always worth doing the exercises: if nothing else you will find what falls naturally onto your page and what merely frustrates you.
There are those who will say: do what you find hard, that’s how you grow. I might add: only sometimes. Sometimes what you find hard, you will keep finding hard, and waste your time getting nowhere with it.
I might say: do what falls naturally to you, because that is what you are meant to do.
I am not meant to be a travel writer. I do not have the personality for it. Unless I find a way of reinventing the travelogue: the introvert’s guide to travelling alone and learning a lot. Has anyone done that yet? If not, I want to copyright that title! Except there is no copyright on titles or ideas.
And of course, I am already working on the Ship project, and the following family history one will take even longer.
In another lifetime, maybe.
~ ~ ~
For me the important question is not ‘how?’ The important question is ‘why?’
Why do I want to write at all?
Why do I want to write about this subject?
Why does this project matter to me?
Why does that one not?
In one of my mini-pamphlets, I say Decide what kind of writer you want to be. I’m not sure that we do ‘decide’. I think we ‘discover’. We scrabble about like babes on the beach until we find the shells and pebbles that seem to us most beautiful, then we begin to make patterns with them, then we begin to allow ourselves to be surprised by what we find and what it becomes.
Understanding why we write leads us inevitably to the answer to another important query: what do I want to do with it, once it’s written?
It still surprises people that this is what I want to do with it. Let it go.
I write not because I have something to say, but because I do not know whether or not I have something to say. It's a way of finding out. It isn't to make money or become famous. I write because I am not going to stand up on a soap-box at the corner and shout my truth. I write because I’m an introvert and this allows me to say what I think and feel, while still hunkered in my deep tiger jungle, all shifting stripes and shadows.
What I want to do with it, is let it go. Let it out into the wild, a captive born cub, carefully reared, set free to fend for itself. I want to it be useful, helpful, comforting, thought-engendering (rather than provoking). I want it to find the people, for the people to find it. I do signpost, but I don’t shout.
When you let a hand-reared cub go, you do so quietly, and merely hope that it will find its own way in the world.
