Several of us have been meeting weekly at a friend’s home on DeMun in a class, “Expanding the Heart: The Practice of Gratitude.” We’re keeping gratitude journals. Here’s a recent entry from mine.
Thank you, Sarah Bollinger, for thinking of me all the way over in Portugal and sending me that candor-drenched letter about your re-looking at the practice of writing, now that you’re done with your doctoral dissertation.
“Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning”
Let me assure you–you have 100 new songs inside you; one tell-all, cut-loose, let-it-rip grad school/church memoir (OK, maybe it’ll be a novel); you’ve got one Mozambique book (or series) percolating; and you’ve got 1000 blog posts whispering–one piece will emerge, lead to another, and that to another, sooner or later they will interpenetrate and continue to generate, your manifold life shining, it’s all good, amen!
“Blow as deep as you want to blow”
Only now are you READY to write from your soul (or Yeats’ “deep heart’s core”), to write whatever you want, with no external judgment, no crazed professorial commissar judge and jury–basta! Writing for fun, for discovery, for play, for prophecy!
“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”
Can you imagine? Naturalmente!
And isn’t timing everything? I just received an hour ago the following excerpt from a dear friend in Chicago: “That month of sending you writings–wow. I remember being high, from writing. I wonder if heroin is half as good as the high from writing. So much power.”
“You’re a Genius all the Time”
To commence, just do the following actions:
1. name a place.
2. pick a time
3. show up there and then we’ll write like there’s no tomorrow because, verdadeiramente, there isn’t!
So much power!
MFC
