First, thank you to all of you who have so generously become paid subscribers! I hardly know what to say. But part of this Substack journey requires I find the words and offer them up, in a cadence that has apparently been determined by algorithms (thank goodness). Not too many words. But not too few either. I’m learning. And because I’m in the midst of the biggest writing project so far – a memoir that attempts to honor and support the tender and atrophied experience of our human belonging through the intimate story of my son’s heroin addiction – I will likely err on the side of too few words for you, my subscribers. At least until that book is out of my hands. I’m just putting together the very shittiest of first drafts for my developmental editor (and so many other things) so…well…it might be another year of fits-and-starts over here. As a bit of an awkward-feeling teaser, I have been contemplating sharing pieces of the memoir with my paid subscribers so that might either entice you to sign up or cancel your paid subscription!
I have always had such tremendous respect and awe (and not a small amount of sacred envy) for those who’ve manage to get paid doing their soul’s work. To a certain extent I fall into that category. But to be paid exclusively to write (and be able to offer all the rest of what I do unencumbered by the need for it to keep my roof over my head) feels a long way off. I’ve never been paid to write, a thing Substack has made possible. As a result of this quite humbling development, I’m having a very different relationship with my creativity! With this new experience being supported by you, my beloved patrons (whether or not you’re a paid subscriber), I have a sense of how it might come to be that I could sustain myself as a writer. And here I find I’m in new terrain as I approach my computer or journal to put words to paper. I want to honor this new sense of sacred obligation (if you will), while not letting the erroneous power money has in our society to determine worth and value to shape how and what I share. I would be doing a great disservice to you, my patrons, were I to start doing that. Likely the exact opposite of what you’ve come to expect from me!
So I have decided to share about my process of writing, and more broadly, the creative process. For now I’m most curious about two things, which might only be one thing. I’m wondering about the care and feeding of the creative soul. The particular day to day cadence of dayworld versus non-ordinary world considerations, the preparation for dreaming and the catching of dreams, the balance of knowing when to turn the light on and pick up the pen at 3 a.m. and when to lie in darkness and allow myself to be courted by all that lives within that fertile misunderstood place.
I’m also wondering about the skill that is catching the story. Not the story I think is worth telling, or the story I think you might want to read. But the story that is a living ensouled being that has, miraculously, set its site on me. I would have thought that once that declaration, that choosing, has occurred, it’s pretty much smooth sailing. I’ve discovered that it’s anything but that. The ensouled story seems to be a dynamic creature, hungry to be shaped right up until and beyond the iteration of it that gets committed to the page. How does the writer keep her senses honed, her frequency tuned, to that particular story? When do we know to stick with what we have so far and imagine it’s good enough? Which might lead me right back to my first wondering about how to maintain my soulful senses so that I might have a hope of listening to the story that is wanting to be told. It would be far easier were I to have decided, from an egoic place, that I happen to have a brilliant story worth telling and by god I’m going to tell it! From nothing other than the wonderful deep imagination of my own mind would I draw the threads to weave that story. In fact, I think I might have started this memoir last Winter Solstice imagining I was doing just that. Only to be set straight months later when I was happily typing away and felt a tap tap on my shoulder. Turning around I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the disappearing specter of the story that wants to be told. It’s a big story and my developmental editor just told me to learn the difference between theme and subject matter, vehicle versus cargo. I’m learning. (Have I said that already?)
So the last thing I’ll leave you with is a riddle of sorts, borne of a moment of soul-feeding in the garden this morning. Contemplating this riddle, trying to imagine the answer, will be its own nourishment of a kind that is nearly extinct in our strange blue-glow culture endlessly streaming other people’s recycled ideas and opinions that have little to nothing to do with what is actually happening in The World (the one we come from, to which we owe everything). How many honey bees does it take to bow and bob the 7’ tall, already top-heavy Michaelmas Daisy stem? Probably not as many as you’d think!
And equally, how many gold finches does it take the bow and bob the 7’ tall already top-heavy Goldenrod stalk? Now for the scientific moment: Millimeter for millimeter it appears honey bees are heavier than gold finches. But of course this is not an exact science and none of the experiment’s participants seem interested in slowing down their fervent autumnal gathering long enough for me to count them more methodically.
We live to have an impact that matters to the continued unfolding of the world.
May you find the place where you are enough to bow the head of the Goldenrod, simply with the weight of your presence. And may there be a witness who might simply say, “I saw that,” and bow their head in reverence.