This is the third time I have come to the page today, wondering what will emerge if I just keep putting one word after the next. I started twice-over to try to write something meaningful. I was led astray into this dark alley by a huge compliment I received during the week. Someone I have never met, do not know beyond that we have each read a few words that the other has written, told me – told the world – that my poetry had touched his soul. I cannot tell you how much that means to me.
It is why I write. It is what I want my words to do.
So while I take writing classes and read all the advice in the magazines and try to learn to be a ‘better’ writer, I realise that I have my own definition of ‘better’. My definition doesn’t mean more likely to be published. It doesn’t mean making a fortune, or even a living, from my writing. It did once. That was the dream. Now it the dream has changed.
Now, I just want my words to mean something to someone. When someone bothers to get in touch to say that helped, or that is beautiful, or that touched something deep within me… my small inner light flares with joy and gratitude. When someone touches me after a reading and tells me you just made me cry…I walk on air for the rest of the day. It might only be one person, it might only be one comment, one moment that they will soon forget, but I never will.
That is why I write.
I am putting this down and putting it out there, because I need to remember this. And any among you who also create (write, paint, cook, craft, carve, sculpt) may you also need to be reminded of it. The “why”. Your ‘why’ may be the same as mine. Most likely, it will be different. All that matters is that we keep it within reach, the touchstone of creativity, the “why”.
Why we keep coming back to the page or the canvas or the kitchen stove. Why we wake up excited, sometimes. Why we are surprised when we produce something that we, actually, quite like.
So how was I led astray by someone telling me exactly what I hope to hear? How could my work doing precisely what I want it to do derail me? Simply put, it made me try too hard.
I thought something along the lines of oh, I can do that…so I need to keep doing that…I need to keep writing deep and meaningful things…
No. I don’t.
I don’t because when I try to, I can’t. I get all sanctimonious and judgemental and political and say things that I’m not (yet) entirely sure I believe and may change my mind about tomorrow.
“Deep” is in itself an interesting concept. I love having deep conversations with people, delving, mining, explorative conversations where we’re open about the fact that we don’t know what we hold true and acknowledge that we’re still finding our way. I like feeling like a small velvet-furred mole burrowing in the darkness. I like not having to hold to an opinion, not having to defend myself, just burrowing, feeling the soil of the world, hearing the wriggling things, wondering what the light looks like and whether I’ll be blinded by it. Many of the people around me don’t share that love.
So that's also part of why I put my thoughts down. If I can't have those conversations with the people I love, like and respect - then I can at least have them with myself. And maybe strangers will connect into my burrow.
As for “meaningful” – I suspect that’s for the reader to decipher rather than the writer to impart, except that if I go back to basics and write what is meaningful for me…maybe that will find its own home.
So, I walked back out of the dark alley of "trying too hard", back into the mundane busy-ness of my ordinary life. I went back to the poem that prompted the comment. I went back to what I wrote last week. I went back into myself, into what I want to do with the words.
While I was doing all of that, I listened to a newcomer to one of my writing groups. We’d been out in the field, literally, a beet field as it happened, but it could just as easily have been a beach or a wood. They said, “I wrote a few things, because people were writing, and I felt I should be, but I
didn’t know what I should be writing.”
Perhaps they were surprised then, when some of us produced near-finished renditions. Perhaps they were more surprised by how many of us said I’ve only got scraps and scrabbles here…I’m going to do this. Or I haven’t anything, just fragments, I want to try to do…but I might not.
There are too many “shoulds” in writing and in life. I’m at that lucky stage where I can throw all the shoulds to the winds – when I remember to do so. The only thing I, personally, should do is to keep coming back to the page. Keep going out into the world, walking and looking and thinking and not-thinking and seeing and feeling and being open to everything that is, and all that is not, and coming back to the page to see if I can make a tiny bit of sense (or sensibility) of any of it.
I went back to what I said last week, and realised how important it is, this need I have to put the pen to the page to talk about ordinary things. Somewhere along the line I may have forgotten my own tag-line: reflections from an ordinary life.
The nature of an ordinary life, especially one that has reached it simplifying stage, is that there will be fallow periods. Times of recovery, times of lying weedy, times of blooming in all the wild ways. If that is what I want to put on the page, then I need to learn how to ‘not try’ to write anything meaningful. Instead to rediscover how to just put down what strikes me in the days between the
pages.
So here it is… a week of ordinary things…
I swam in my local pool. I know you’d rather hear about wild swimming in seas and lakes and rivers… but most days, I walk through suburban streets, past wildflower verges, under surprisingly ancient oaks, and swim in the pool. They are both meditations: the walk and the swimming up and down and counting lengths and simply remembering to breath the air and not the water.
I caught up with an old friend, who gifted me an elephant, and an hour of suitably silly conversation sharing the best of past lives, and current ones. We’re told to live in the moment, but there are times when doing that means both reliving the joyous past and anticipating a happy future. Memories and plans should not be mutually exclusive. We laughed at ourselves.
I spent time with writers – all of them more accomplished than me – some who take my breath away with their depth of knowledge, one or two who restore it with their joyful absurdity. We walked up the blackthorn tunnel, past its wedding glory, now sheltering other flowering things, onto a beet field that we last saw in barley. It was glorious last time we were there, corn marigolds and corn and sunshine. This day it was scruffy, under thunder-threatening skies, harsh rows, softened by contours, flints clawing their way to the surface, sprayed to the complete absence of weeds…and yet…someone pointed out the nests just over the rise: oyster catchers and lapwing, raising their young high above the marsh. Crows soon seen off.
We call it “the lark field” for the simple reason that there is the inevitable looking upwards to try to find the source of that tumbling song…how sad would it be (will it be?) if we ever venture up there in the right season and find only silence? Or only jet-roar? The planes go over. They scream. But lark doesn’t miss a beat, (s)he pumps his/her way skywards and overflows with tremulous love of our tenuous life.
I danced. Technically, it is an exercise class – but I was pulled into the studio by the person who told me (via an intermediary) that it’s not about being any good at it, it is just “such a joy” to be there – and who doesn’t need, or can’t make room for, more joy in their life? They were not wrong.
I came to my desk and wrote. I went into my garden and cut back the things that have finished their flowering. I practiced, and relearnt the link I’d forgotten. I picked up a rope. I cooked and ate. I slept.
I lived another week.
I LIVED another week.
And if I get to keep on doing that, so simply, so ordinarily, so contentedly – for the most part – for a long time yet, I will continue to count myself deeply blessed.
