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Before we begin: Mark your calendar.
Writing Spirit: Listening for the Wisdom Keeper. April 14, 21 and 28. Noon/Eastern.
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Workshop links coming soon!
In this post: I am having trouble writing. It’s time to write about that.
In our Weekly Journey circle someone said, “I feel as if I’m swimming through Jell-o.” Me, too, I thought. One day, we’re in a birth canal. The next, a bright room. One day, everything seems brighter, sharper - I can see for miles. The next day, I wake up sitting in traffic.
I have been trying to launch a new program for months but pfft….. nothing happens. Something has short-circuited. At the same time, a new set of wires has appeared. I don’t know what to do with them.
You don’t have to understand this, the guides remind me. Something is changing. Learn from it. Lean toward it. Let it have you.
Three days ago, I went to Facebook to connect, to move energy and I found myself idling by the little box that asks: What’s on your mind?
I floated, waiting for words to come. I had nothing. No wisdom to share, no insight or memory. I just wanted to say hello. So I said that.
Just saying hello, I wrote. Ridiculously quiet inside. People responded, equally simply, most wrote: Hello, Amy.
I loved that. It was a small thing. The tiniest conversation: Hello. Hello back.
It shifted something.
What is the incentive, the purpose, the call that makes us write?
I feel stuck. A new kind of stuck - starting and not finishing post after post. Unable to send them. For me, writer’s block is (almost always) about having too much to say. When I get stuck I find myself standing before the (same) gate: indecision and perfectionism. Things are piling up in my brain and my notebook. Which should I talk about now?
It’s less writer’s block than it is congestion. Too much, too fast, all important. Add to that the Substack overload, with everyone’s in-box overflowing with good writing.
I start circling: Is this post really necessary? Do I need to trouble people with this insight, this memory, this story right now? We all have more important things to do.
Don’t we?
I write that down and again, take a breath. Do I need to name this? Do I need to tame this? It’s some new kind of wildness, an unfamiliar free flow - I have to capture it. Don’t I?
I’ve been trying to write to you - doodling about the new staircase my husband gifted me (it’s being built right now, noisily, as I type these words onto the screen). Been meaning to mention how, now that spring is so near, I feel alive again but there’s this wide, deep chasm between now and that sort of sunlight.
Last week, my husband came down with the flu. He walked through the house hacking and miserable. I made all the brews, soaked healing leaves in hot water - stirred in raw honey. Every day, I checked myself for symptoms.
Mysteriously, I did not catch it. Instead, this weird exhaustion has crept over me - as if I’ve been out running marathons (I haven’t). I’ve been sitting. Silent. Still. Not reading. Not meditating. Just staring out the window and listening - intently - for . . . something. I’ll know it when I hear it.
Writing this, just now, I sighed and set it aside. There is so much noise. So much reaching for our attention. I just… can’t. I’m at the point in my work as a writer/blogger/teacher where the rush to get the words out onto the page before they are lost has . . is . . . it’s just gone.
I’ve written (or said in my classes) much of what I want to say. Right now, I want to watch the light change. I want to keep listening because, you can sense this, cant you?, something beautiful is on its way.
I used to believe that my words were a vital part of that something. I felt with every cell of my body that if I could just get the message through, I could help save the world. Now that I understand that the world does not need saving there’s less urgency. If I am not (singlehandedly) responsible for delivering the message that will realign the universe with love then maybe I can rest.
Perhaps I am listening now for the real purpose of my work and of my life. Perhaps I have already found it. I know this much: It was never about saving anything. It was a simpler thing: the need to connect.
With Love, with myself, the need to connect with a reader - with you. It was always about that. And out of that connection, the cultivation of joy.
Such a simple, seeming small thing has turned out to be the only thing that ever mattered.
How about that for perfection?
:)
Just now, I took a break to make dinner. I popped on a podcast: Julia Louis Dreyfus ’s delightful “Wiser Than Me”. In this episode, Ruth Reichl shares an anecdote from her early career that resonates with all of this. She was working as a freelance writer when the LA Times offered her a job as their restaurant critic. Reluctant to trade the freelance life for an office job, she confided in her friend, the legendary food writer MFK Fisher, who said, “You take that job. You are polishing every word you write as if it were a gem. And you need the experience of going to a newspaper where an editor says to you, ‘I need 15 inches and I need it in an hour’ and you do it and it’s not the best thing you ever wrote but it’s good enough and tomorrow it’s gonna be lining someone’s bird cage. . . You need that experience - you need to learn to write fast and it’s not gonna be perfect.’”
This advice transcended, ‘Take that job’. Reichl remembers. “It was about perfection in some way. As an editor, I have known so many writers who can’t turn the work in because it’s not perfect yet. And you can waste your whole life looking for perfection because nothing will ever be perfect. No book is ever really finished. You can keep making those sentences better. The advice that she gave me, essentially was, “Don’t ever think that perfection is the goal because it’s not - it can’t be.”
Hearing this today was a kind of synchronicity - and a reminder that even the most celebrated writers struggle. Hearing someone else articulate her experience helps me surface my own wisdom.I’m reminded WHY I write and why it matters. Words, writing them, reading them, have always been my way of reaching for and making connection with the world and with other people.
And so, in the spirit of the wise women who wrote before me, here’s my post - imperfect for sure, an unpolished but visible gem. Now that you’ve got it we can connect. And that’s the real goal - the only goal that ever mattered.
I invite you to connect with me, with yourself and with the work. If you’d like to leave a comment, do that here.
If you’d like talk with me - I offer one on one sessions, workshops, online circles. I have a School of Magic - which looks like a Substack but works like a membership.
In the meantime, you can check out the things I’ve been quietly posting (without sending a newsletter).
Why quiet posting?
Because our inboxes are overflowing with Substack right now and my (shy) perfectionist is like, “Let’s not add to the deluge unless it’s the BEST thing we’ve ever written” while my writer self keeps conjuring words.
New entries to the Flow Journals: Channeled messages from the Guardians of the Field of Love and Blessing. There are so many messages - and they are all so beautiful and deep. People who love the Flow Journals can find them all here.
Selected Curated Transcripts from Journey, my weekly call
- because I want you to see what happens there so you can join us if it resonates. This is where I’ll be posting them. You’ll find the first one there by the end of the week.Also, I found another poym and an essay opened inside of it. The Lost and Found Poyms are all here.
Other Peoples’ Good Things
Catherine Palmer: Sorry I didn’t write. I didn’t want to.
This song made my whole body feel happy and powerful. (h/t: I found it on Lyz Lentz’s Substack, Men Yell at Me in her Dingus of the Week post.)
It’s raining outside and from the inside of my warm office, I am surrounded by the drip-drop kerplop of life moving, snow melting as nature clears the way for spring.
Happy Wednesday.
All the love
Amy
xxoo