Open Heart | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

1. Truth: The secret to flight, to freedom is to open your heart. For the longest time I’ve been gluing found feathers to my sleeves and in my hair, drawing ink outlines of wings on the skin of my back, buying angel wings intended to be used for Halloween costumes, reading books on the mechanics of flight, imagining that in this way I would eventually learn to fly. Flight–the journey through space, movement through time, escape from fixed ideas and expectations, freedom doesn’t happen this way. Instead I have to relax, let go, leap or float away, open my heart and let it all in, soar in a way that is entirely different than birds do.

2. Truth: Unravelling, being broken can wake you up, give you back your life. When this started to happen to me–trauma, loss, grief, suffering–I imagined myself a perfectly constructed sweater being unravelling loop by loop, stitch by stitch, falling apart, but it turns out it was more like a tangled mess of Christmas lights, usable and workable only after they were unravelled–only then could they be lit up, only then could they color the darkness. I lost so much, only to discover what was true, what was real, what mattered in the ashes of my life after the burning. At times, it felt like dying, but it was only after, shaky and raw, that I felt fully alive, broken open.

3. Truth: Courage and vulnerability are essential, the only way to stay awake. Courage is the ability to do something that scares you, to have strength in the face of pain or grief. To be vulnerable is to be exposed potential harm, to possibly be hurt, wounded. To love what is mortal, to open my heart and be present with whatever arises, to be fully alive, awake and present, to accept impermanence is to be both vulnerable and courageous.

One wish: May we be brave even as we are broken. May we keep our hearts open knowing that we are vulnerable, that we’ll be hurt. May we have the courage to unravel, to fly, to love, to stay awake to life as it comes, whether terrible or tender, beautiful or brutal.

Just last week, these trees were on fire with golden leaves. Now, they are bare, naked and gray. They remind me that life is like this: one minute you are burning with life, and in the next moment, things have changed and so have you. We will all be lit up, shine for a brilliant but relatively brief moment, and eventually our light will go out. This is impermanence, this is the nature of our experience.

Someone recently asked me, after finding out I was a writing teacher, “oh, I have a friend who is a writing major, do you have any advice for her?” I mumbled some string of random things that essentially boiled down to “it’s a hard way to make a living.” I said something about developing other unique skills that would be related, like being able to code a webpage, that she should be willing to string together a lot of other little things to add up to a “living,” and that only people who really want it, are determined, will be able to stay with it long enough to make it, that you have to really want it. She surprised me with the question and I didn’t really know what to say, but it’s worth considering.

“What do you do?”
“I am a writer.”
“Really? What have you written?”
“Words on paper.”
~From an actual conversation I’ve had, more than once

And when I spent a bit of time considering it, my answer wasn’t much better: Read. Write, a lot. Develop a practice. If your first question is “how do I get published?,” you’re doing it wrong. Stop talking about it. Don’t join a writer’s group. Take classes, but know when to stop learning and just do. Don’t write for attention, money or fame, write because you can’t help yourself, you can’t stop yourself–don’t be a writer unless it’s your only option and you just know you’ll die if you don’t. Discover your own voice. “Pay attention, be astonished and tell about it,” (Mary Oliver). Some of the time, don’t write. Don’t forget to live, don’t forget to breathe. Pay attention to story. See meaning everywhere. Recognize patterns and believe in magic. Let go of judgement. Surrender. Try. Fail. Try again. Show up. Be boring in your life but wild on the page. Tell the truth. Get rid of energy vampires, shadow comforts and time monsters. Be your own kind of weird. Be kind.

Then it came to me, the only advice worth giving, the only way I know for sure how to be a writer, the only way to be alive, awake: live with your heart all the way open, and even when it’s hard, when it hurts, keep it open. In this way, you will know things, you will notice, and you will recognize what needs to be said about what you see, you will understand the secret message that only you can communicate, that just maybe you were born to share. As you “feel the rapture of being alive” (Joseph Campbell), you will know what to say, you will connect your innate wisdom and kindness to the right words and tell the story that the rest of us need to hear.