We hear the messages we’re meant to hear. We find the teachers we need and then sometimes we move away from them, usually when we’ve learned what they had to say specifically to us at this point in time. Maybe we will go back to them for another lesson and maybe we will not. Neither choice is a comment on their teaching, but rather one on our learning.
We know the saying that when the student is ready, the master will appear. I’ve long held that the reverse is also true, that when the master is ready, the student will appear. Now I’m thinking there is another opposite which also holds a truth: when the student is ready for the next step, the master will disappear. Or re-appear.
Sometimes we learn all that a given person has to teach us in a short space of time. Sometimes we will not learn all they have to teach us in eons of constant study. And yet other times we need to visit and move away and come back, like waves revisiting the beach of knowledge to sift through the pebbles and the sand to see what we are now capable of carrying with us. At this point in time.
There is no single process. We create our own path even as we walk it.
We hear the messages we’re meant to hear. We find the lessons we’re meant to learn. We simply need to pay attention.
I am learning from living and listening and paying attention.
Ok, sometimes the universe has to shout quite loudly to get my attention. I am also only human. But when I do pay attention, I hear the whispers.
One recent day I read these things in Eric Maisel’s book A Writer’s Space:-
“you must create the meaning in your life…
stand up as a meaning maker…
life can have meaning even if the universe has
none…
make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean”.
These messages came hard on the heels of the chapter about how writers should take a busman’s
holiday. The message was “don’t go on vacation, go on retreat – a writer’s retreat”. It insisted that as writers we must go where we’re going but go with the intention to write. Decide which project we’re going to work on and go with the intention, the heart-felt, mindful intention to write. Then go. And write. And enjoy.
The context of my receiving this message (and bear in mind this is not my first reading of this book) is that I’m about to head back to the island.
My most recent jaunts from home have been trips to the hills and were billed in my own mind as writing retreats, but I disappointed myself in how little writing I did. I now know why. I did not go with mindful intent. I did not go with the project held in mind. I went hoping to get some writing done. Writing isn’t done from hope. Hope looks at the page and goes swimming instead. Hope looks at the blank screen and thinks about shopping for dinner. Hope picks up a pen and doodles. On a good day, hope picks up a camera and at least finds images that might spark something later. Hope does not weave the words, cast the spells, call down the magic. Intention does that. Intention and application.
The thing is that hope is easier. It is more flimsy. Lighter.
Intention means commitment. Intention requires clarity about the purpose and value of the exercise. Hope is the vague plea to the universe to ‘help me out here’. Intention says 'I’m serious, support me. Please.'
The good news is that if we master intention, application follows automatically. Application is just the graft, but the graft is easy because with intention we know the what and the why, and then the how just happens. We may need a little kick-start. We may need to re-boot everyday. But once we’re started, the gate is opened and creativity flows. And it’s fun, and it’s productive, and who says I’m not on holiday? I’m doing what I want. I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. I’m having a ball!
Oh, alright then. If we really must be realistic: I balk at the idea because I’m in holiday mode and holidays are specifically NOT for realism and pragmatism and other boring concepts, they are for fantasy and dreams and adventure. Ah, but yes! Coffee in a backstreet café DOES count as adventure if its not something you do every week, we’re not all designed to go sky-diving.
Reality says: it won’t all flow clean & perfect. Some of it, maybe all of it, will be cringe-worthy. A large chunk will be diversions down alleyways that we can’t see the end of. Thank you reality! Duly noted.
We'll come back to reality later. Reality is another job, another intention, for another day. The edits, the re-writes, the cutting, pruning, re-shaping, the oh-definitely-not-ever deleting. That work can wait.
The retreat work is birthing-new-creations work. It is the chasing-after-inspiration work. It is sitting in cafés, drinking cocktails with a view of the bar or the street, listening to the waters at midnight, scouring the market at midday, scuffing along empty beaches whatever the weather, riding buses, strolling lanes, looking at the sky and the ground, swimming in pools or seas or rivers, absorbing the precise colours of the street art and the awning over that bungalow you pass every day. It is going into the galleries you stumble across, rather than the ones that all the brochures say you MUST visit. It is absorbing the gossip rather than the history. Listening to the local songs of today, even if you hate them. It is doing all of these things and all the other things with intention and the intention is to catch them on the wing, to write them down there and then. In all their bold colours, all their banality, all their boisterousness or boredom.
A writing retreat is not a research trip. That’s the mistake I had been making. I had been looking for interesting things to maybe write about. Not this time. This time I am going in order to write. I am not pre-fixing what I will find. I am pre-fixing what I will do with what I will find. I am listening to the messages from Maisel, but also this one that I read on the same day (from Natalie Goldberg):
“Let go completely. Let yourself totally be a writer from now on.”
Excuse me for now – I need to go and grab my (writing) gear.
~ / ~
