Writing from the Inside Out (5 page)

I begin writing by writing without remembering what makes a piece of writing. I write so that the pages pile up and structure is born of its own accord. There's not always a good reason why a written piece needs to look a certain way or adopt given dimensions.

When I decided that I was going to write twenty books in a year, I made a list of what I thought would be good titles for each book. As a way of getting started, I daydreamed some way of framing each book's experience. It wasn't too tricky to come up with the first ten or so titles. Beyond that, I really had to think about it. And because I came up with twenty rather than just ten, I came to look at each book in a different way. I had to try out several different modes of writing and of organization. In my better moments, I had nothing to prove.

Poetry happens — and it happens when filing taxes, when dreaming of warfare, when writing, whether or not it takes the outward form of poetry, and it happens when reading, because poetry is a relationship between subject and object, the shape of thoughts and feelings. I don't have to add or color it to be any other way.

 

 

The exercises in this book are meant to help writers produce work they are happy with, in life and on the page. Think of them as yoga practice. The purpose of what happens on the yoga mat is the experience of greater union with the divine through the body. It is an expression with inward significance. Yoga and writing should both be looked at as offerings.

Writing that has been treasured for centuries and passed down might be spiritual in nature, ecstatic, entertaining, instructional, or even bawdy recordings from real human beings, written so long ago that they seem too important to have been put together by human hands. Looking closely at the collected writing where authorship can be traced, I see plenty of so-so or off-putting pieces mixed in with what's good and celebrated.

Good writing, enlivened writing, writing that I enjoy stems from engagement with ordinary experience. It is meditation in the midst of action. I write about whatever I like. I let the form happen; I let the feeling dictate the structure my writing takes. I let success happen and don't let anything constrain my relationship with the imagination. It's hard enough to stay on the path where creativity deepens and thrives over the long term.

I write from life when that strikes me as significant, and I write imaginatively when that's what I feel called to do. When life is filled with pain, I strive so that my work heals and transcends that pain. Energetically, when it disrupts the expected flow of events, pain can shake things loose in a way that leaves me more liberated and empowered. When my life is lucky and happy, I am authentic to that lived truth in my writing — I share the depth and specificity of that; the one who listens to my words as I put them on the page wants to feel my efforts to make a sounding board of the soul. Whatever my circumstances at any given moment, I have the opportunity to direct my thoughts toward an all-encompassing compassion, and in this way, practice yoga. Moments that could potentially be most transformative are often not easy. The more I practice, the more the momentum of practice carries me forward.

Practice means to focus on my life's work of peace and love with regard to the kind of creative pursuit that takes me for the full ride, the most challenging trip imaginable, and the one for which I alone am uniquely suited. The result of transcending the ego is benefiting others. This is something we all can do.

This approach connects me with the natural world. It is meditation in the midst of action.

I think of Hatha yoga as poetry of the body. Yoga is conflated with its physical appearance. Poetry is conflated with its literary appearance. Yoga and poetry might just be the very same thing. Goethe said that everything is a metaphor — and all metaphors mean more than one thing. A garden in summer is the warm hearth in winter. The barista leans forward to whisper something difficult to discern and is the oracle of Delphi.

My twenty-book year was productive, but being productive in itself is not the best thing in the world. What matters is whether I am relating authentically to my craft, whether the articulation challenges me — and whether I am unattached. Sometimes I get flummoxed about publication when the best thing would be to create work that stems from my immediate experience as an offering to my social sphere. It is beneficial to work with equal integrity whether there is widespread distribution or not.

My advice: Write something that exceeds your abilities. Strive to offer the world something that blooms from effort and disposition in a way for which you cannot accept credit. The imagination, not the ego, is worth celebrating.

I wouldn't say that writing as yoga practice is a replacement for other forms of yoga. My writing may be the most important thing for me to do, but I benefit from meditation. Hatha yoga practice was designed to be the fast track to experiencing true freedom and enlightenment. I benefit from doing good in the world. I benefit from living sustainably.

My practice speaks to the importance of bringing the light of consciousness into places of pain and awkwardness. When doing so, parts of me relax that I didn't even realize were constricted, because it's habitual to have kinks and hang-ups. Interior work helps me maintain my new habit of being open. I direct my attention toward objects that connect me to gratitude and amazement. I let these thoughts magnify my love and my means of giving form to that love. I don't let comparisons interfere in a negative way. At this point in time, I don't think that cynicism is any damn good for anything.

I had been meaning to watch the movie
The Secret Life of Plants
for several years, but just never sat down and watched it. I found the film's concept fascinating, and I enjoyed Stevie Wonder's far-out soundtrack. So, eventually my wife and I watched it. I was emotionally and spiritually moved by the film, by the beautiful time-lapse photography, by how it celebrated a close look at growing things. I loved to see the various scientific findings (whether they were really scientific or not) because they expressed an intuitive truth. Whether someone actually was able to teach her cactus to speak Japanese (one of the film's claims) wasn't as important as the richness of attention given to living, growing plants. If plants were able to communicate with us in our language, we would recognize that they — like us — are not simple quantities of mass. Our own life is something we understand (at least in theory, if not always in practice) to be precious and wonderful and rare. The film was more than a little sad, because it projected such hope for the future, and it was already thirty-five-years old by the time I watched it. I admired the film as a piece of poetry that forgivably clung literally to what is, instead, a figurative truth.

I put faith in science. I value when science is able to demonstrate something. In many ways, I value science above intuition. But often, I hope that science is able to demonstrate something that may just not fall under a perfectly rational purview. If I like something, I might not want to bother trying to demonstrate scientifically why I like it; I just like it, and that's how it is — for the time being. Someone might be able to demonstrate relationships between my behavior and the action that I claim to like, or between elevated brain hormones and increased circulation when I am exposed to a given stimulus; perhaps that link would illustrate arousal, though it hasn't really dealt with the concern of why I like it. At the moment of my death, science won't save me — nor will science give me comfort.

Living and dying are more art than science; because something is an art does not make it “soft.” Conformism comes from dependence on what has already been proven. It benefits me to allow room for curiosity and wonder in my actions. Where the practice of poetry takes me is the only place worth going.

 

 

Not very long ago, an accident damaged my eyesight, and the doctor told me that without surgery, I would go blind in a very short time. He said that in both eyes, my retinas were peeling off. As a result, vitreous fluid would leak into places it wasn't supposed to, and the retina would continue to undrape — like faulty wallpaper — so that light entering into the eye would be refracted uselessly. It would be lights out, and before long, the eyes, too, would rot and need to be surgically removed.

I had seven retinal tears in my left eye and nine in my right eye. A couple of days after the news, I underwent surgery to repair both eyes. Part of the recovery required that I spend over six weeks lying on my left side with my head tilted at a forty-fivedegree angle. Three months and several in-office procedures later, I was finally allowed to do things that were remotely strenuous. I was finally permitted to bend over to pick something up. Prior to the surgery, I had been very active and physically fit. Being still and seeing the body lose its vibrancy and tone wasn't fun. I had a lot of trust in my doctor. I remained as positive as I could and tried to be productive. I had a lot of time to reflect on life.

During the time I was recovering, I listened to dozens of books on tape, including
War and Peace
, a long book, and with the help of some patience and my then-fiancée, Jade, I planned our wedding and marketed our first Wellness and Writing Immersion Retreats in Italy. There was so much in life I couldn't do, so I focused on what I could do. I wouldn't describe the experience as a meditative one — it was more like a dream. The way the mind gives pictures when dreaming happened all the time, which made listening to audio books a vivid and complete experience. I think the state of being near a dream facilitated new ideas and allowed concepts about writing and about life to sink in.

I was more introspective during those months of recovery because I felt that I had to be. I couldn't really see, so I couldn't adjust what I was saying to fit the listener's visual cues; I had to speak from the heart or not at all. Keeping this internal frame of reference has been important for me. I cannot control what other people think or feel, but I can manage my own thoughts and feelings.

Dinesh Bahl, the ophthalmologist whose expert abilities prevented me from going blind, is a wonderful human being beyond his skill as a doctor. About a year after he repaired my vision, he got engaged, and just prior to the wedding ceremony, he learned he had cancer. Though his operation went well and his prognosis was positive, the experience affected him. I went to see him for an office visit because I wanted to say hello, and found him a changed man. He told me that his wedding was the best day of his life, even though the operation prevented him from speaking his wedding vows aloud. “There's more to life than work,” he said. This is the man whose work prevents people from going blind, and he meant it, and it's true. We promised to keep in touch, and I know he meant that, too.

If this person, whose job is to prevent blindness and restore sight, deserves to take time for himself, then we can live fully for ourselves no matter our vocation. Being able to give someone your true smile from deep down is no small thing. We should welcome each twist and new development insofar as we are able.