Prompt: “On Lightness” by Heather Swan

This morning’s walk was all about the birds. I hadn’t expected it to be so. I was tired, having stayed up an extra hour to read but still getting up at the same time, just before the sun started to move enough to begin to light the sky, turning it that deep blue like night, that color Eric loves so much. I was tired and apathetic, unsure where to walk Ringo — would we go by T.’s studio to say “hi,” would we walk there and back or drive over and park nearby, walk a lap at the cemetery or in the field behind her place? Would we go to Lincoln Jr. High or drive to North Shields Ponds? I even talked to Eric as we sat on the couch together about if there was a way to loop around a cement pond, to park somewhere nearby without making the loop too long for Ringo, restricted now as he is.

I landed on North Shields Ponds. Maybe we’d see some deer or the heron fishing for breakfast on the river where the big rocks are. I was still feeling blah about it when we reached the second pond and I saw a gathering of white, a group of pelicans — I wonder what they are called, if they have a name like a clutch or gaggle or murder? [I checked, “A group of pelicans is most commonly called a squadron, pod, scoop, or pouch. When fishing or swimming together in a group, they are also frequently referred to as a fleet or a brief”]. The were scooping their long beaks in the water, putting their whole head under and then raising them up to swallow. I assume there were small fish they were eating but then the flash of a bigger fish caught for just a moment in the golden tongs of a single bird before it was swallowed whole. They were moving along the far edge of the water and towards the back of the pond, going almost as fast as we were walking.

As we came around the back of the pond, a large bird with a thick light colored chest and long wings flew over us and I thought it might be an owl, partly because we’ve seen them there before and party because I wanted to see one. We saw it a few more times and when we came around by the river, it landed high in a tree, calling out in a way I didn’t recognize, so I got out my phone and opened my Merlin app. It was an osprey, and just then, a heron flew east along the length of the river. I was finally awake, in my body, happy to be there in the cold of the early morning with my dog, where my feet where, where the birds were.

Prompt: “Apprentice” (poem in progress, shared by the author) by Michelle Latvala

The singing before the silence. This is the moment I’m efforting to live in now, this moment in time, this space and place where both Mom and Ringo are still alive but it is understood that these days are numbered, the metronome of love ticking away, measuring the time, always ticking in the background. I was reading a passage from the Mark Nepo book, The Fifth Season, about the shift in awareness and creativity that happens when we enter into this last room, this resting place of final moments, this place where rest happens but also change is brewing, a transition coming, what we often call a thinning of the veil, this final turn both towards and away. 

Mark Nepo was referencing something from, if I remember correctly, Arabic culture, a thing they call the Greedy One, [I checked and it is Arabic, Al-Nafs-Al-Amara, Nafs for short, meaning “the lower or bitter soul, one constantly and actively engaged in wanting”], the one that grasps and hoards in an effort to protect itself, but in its confusion, it buries itself instead, and as he described it, it reminded me of what Buddhists call a Hungry Ghost, for whom the suffering lives not in the accumulation but rather in the longing, because it’s said to be hungry and thirsty but has a tiny mouth and an almost completely closed off throat, so no matter what they try to eat or drink, if fails to satisfy, and the hunger and thirst never cease, that longing will never be met.

I have such an affinity for the hungry ghost, for that longing never satisfied, for that hunger never met, that thirst never quenched. I got off track here, from the singing before the silence. The hunger makes it hard to find my voice and I keep skipping ahead to the silence I know is coming, is inevitable, silence so loud I cannot hear myself sing.

Prompt: “Goatsong” by Catherine Pierce

All the love that didn’t serve me my therapist has invited me to label as “unhealthy” to see if that shift in perspective might help me to let it go. The issue is I’ve taken all the love, including that which didn’t serve me, and rewritten it as a rulebook, a bible, a guide or map for how I’m supposed to live, who I’m supposed to be, and it isn’t working and I know better but I struggle to embody the love and wisdom I know that lives in my head. It travels above me like a balloon or a kite, it hovers above me like a cloud, but it doesn’t feed me, doesn’t give me a place to lay my head down to sleep, it doesn’t connect to where my feet are rooted, it doesn’t offer breath, and yet I let it pull me around, let it determine my direction, live in its weather, all this love that didn’t serve me.

Am I a hungry ghost with that impassible throat that won’t allow any connection to my belly, to my heart? It isn’t even a question about if I am the obstacle, that’s obvious, the question is how, what do I do to open myself up? How do I let the love that will nourish me get where it needs to go? My mind understands the words, the general concept. I’d even give you the answer if you asked me, but somehow I can’t feel it in my body, can’t breathe or drink it in. It’s like there’s this disconnect, this hole in the center where things pass through, leak out, and I don’t know how to hold the love while also letting it flow, not closing off. How to keep my heart open while also somehow resting, residing in this home I build of blood and bones. How to keep open the windows and doors but also not get lost, not float off somewhere, leaving my feet stranded in my shoes.

Kind and gentle reader, I’ve shared things written in wild writing sessions on my blog in the past. When I used to still write with my original teacher, Laurie Wagner (as I did for 10+ years), she often would listen to me read something I’d written live in session and say, “blog it!” and I’d do just that. Laurie no longer teaches her smaller group regular classes, so the last Friday morning group I wrote with, with her, decided to continue to write together, same place and day and time, and we jokingly started calling our sessions “wildish” writing, and sometimes something comes up there that I want to share here, and I do.

This past Friday, as she often does, one of our members said, “I wish you all would type up what you wrote and send it to the group so I could read it again.” This particular member, my dear friend Cynthia, has been writing with me on Friday mornings almost since I started. In fact, she was talking recently how she’d found her first wild write with Laurie, and it made me curious, so I dug through my 20 years of journals and found mine, and it turns out it was in a class we’d taken together. I’d already been thinking that so many pages of writing already done, and in particular those years of weekly wild writing practice are all books I’ve already written, and that I want to type and edit them so I can share more, here and maybe some day in some physical paper books, “hard copies” you could hold in your hands.

As part of this plan, I’ve been working on reorganizing my writing space. I bought some bookshelves and am working on organizing the shelves and bins of filled journals that are currently in the closet to move to the shelves where they are more accessible, more workable. As a way to start, I’m going to post my pieces from wildish writing and old wild writing sessions more often here. I also, as I have for a while but life got in the way, would like at some point to offer some wild writing sessions online, invite those of you who might be interested to try the practice that’s been such magic, such medicine for me.