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

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.

I started writing with Laurie Wagner eight years ago. When I quit my job last May, almost a full year ago now, I quit a lot of other things too, and writing with Laurie was one of them. I was in the process of calling all my energy back to myself, back to my core. I wanted to know what might arise if I slowed down, let go of all my projects, made space. In practical terms, I no longer had much of an income and wasn’t sure when that might change, so I thought it best to not spend any extra money until I was more settled into retirement.

The problem is that writing with Laurie isn’t a luxury, it’s essential. Once the world shifted, I thought I should get back to practicing with Laurie, but because she’s no longer teaching her classes in person, all the online sections filled. Luckily, she announced her 27 Wildest Days offering, “27 brand new videos that offer you a chance to create a daily writing practice on your own. Each day you’ll get a very short – under 10 minutes – video from me telling you something about Wild Writing, reading you a poem and giving you a couple of jump off lines. From there you will write on your own for 15 minutes. You don’t send me anything, it’s not a class, just a chance for you to lay it down and get real on the page.”

When I took my first class with Laurie, I posted an open love letter to her on my blog, which started with,

Certain people that you encounter in your life will change you, alter the way you experience the world in significant and long lasting ways. The impact of their light, their nakedness, their wild love continues to ripple and shiver and quake all corners of your life, sending out aftershocks that continue long after your focused time together, making things forever different, illuminated. Laurie Wagner is one of those people.

I just love her so much. And I’m so happy to be writing with her again. Even though she’s sending an email every day, and I could do the practice every day, I’ve been saving the prompts and videos, savoring them, wanting them to last a little longer. Here’s what I wrote in response to the day one prompt, which was essentially a reflection on “when the virus came,” and more specifically I started with “I wanna tell you about…”

Neighborhood grade school’s playground is wrapped in caution tape, recess is cancelled

I wanna tell you about how at the beginning of all this, the staying home, Eric working from home, it was clear that Eric needed projects, was restless and if that energy went on for too long without somewhere to land, he’d become irritated, frustrated, so I asked him to trim down the rose bushes in front of the house. They are climbing roses, but someone planted them directly in front of the big window in our living room. They grow tall, trying to climb but without anything to attach to, eventually blocking the light, so I cut them way back each year.

Said roses

I asked Eric to do it for me this year but we haven’t been able to find the clippers and now it might be too late because they already started to bud out tiny leaves, sending energy and effort all the way up the stalks I wanted cut down. And then, this morning, a robin sat on the very top of one of those stalks and it really seemed too late, like the moment to make the change had passed and now both the buds and the birds were making use of, even needing the things I wanted rid of.

I wanna tell you that just days before the first wave of shut downs, people still didn’t know much about the virus, weren’t taking it seriously, weren’t thinking about it much, weren’t preparing for it yet, but me, I spent four days in a row going to the grocery store, each day thinking of a few more things we might need, still only thinking in terms of two weeks, 14 days, and the third trip to the store, I bought two packs of toilet paper and Eric made fun of me, but just two days later, not only was the toilet paper all gone but also most of the paper towels, napkins, wipes, and tissues, and I had to wait in line for 45 minutes at the check out, how we all stood so close together.

That same day, classes moved online at CSU and FRCC for the rest of the spring semester. Two days later, group fitness classes at the gym were cancelled. By the end of the week, the gym was closed altogether, all restaurants had moved to take-out or delivery only. My yoga class I teach was cancelled indefinitely and the classes I took were moved to Zoom. My massage was rescheduled, my haircut canceled, Sam’s teeth cleaning postponed. We started to be more careful about using all our perishable foods, shifted to picking up our groceries without needing to go inside the store, wore masks, waited in the car while Sam went in for his physical therapy — which he was much better at without me there to distract him. Then it became clear we’d need to cancel our trip to Oregon this summer. My mom got a smartphone and learned to text on the Tuesday of the week everything shut down and I took my first dose of Zoloft.