It took me so long to figure out what I wanted to do, and an even longer time for it to circle around again and manifest in my life. I remember when I found writing for real. I had always been keeping a journal since the 5th grade, but when I did an M.A. in writing it solidified the next step for me. It became the bridge between my interior and the external world. Writing helps me get a sense of who I truly am and what inspires and drives me. It’s like a computer speaking in 0’s and 1’s, or a physicist deciphering universal mysteries with equations, or a surgeon mending a broken body. What we love speaks to us about who we really are, and who we are in the process of becoming.
For me, writing has always been a place to speak my truth. Especially in a journal that no one else is going to read, it’s a place to really get it all out in the open. This is the magic of keeping a journal. And I have kept all kinds from a straight up diary with a lock and key, to Julia Cameron’s morning pages (three pages first thing to get you warmed up and in touch with what’s really going on), to Ira Progoff’s “The Intensive Journal,” which is intense. (It’s just an added bonus that it combines my love of writing deeply with my unnatural affinity for school and office supplies.)
Within the realm of writing I fell in love with poetry. I couldn’t get enough. I took extra classes, workshops, hung out with all kinds of poets and writers. It spoke to me, not in the bookish, intellectual way where I win the Pushcart and do readings, but in a deep and vital way that spoke directly to my heart. It felt like the language of my soul.
Finding that language, inspired a synthesis between what I wrote and how I began to live. They connected. They tell you to write what you know, just like we grow up living what we know, familiar family and neighborhoods, friends and ways of behaving. But there has to be more. This connection that took place inside turned into something larger because there has to be a personal meaning and energy behind what we say or do for it to translate. The more lively the connection between what goes on internally and how faithfully we translate that in our day to day lives, let’s us, and others, begin to see who we really are. It’s like a mathematical equation, the more energy and zest we put in, the more beauty and meaning comes out.
The poetry I started to create was the poetry of myself, it came from the inside out. It combines both, the way I write and live, and they both contain my personal and unique vision. First and foremost there is the realization, making a connection, the ah-ha moment. But there also has to be an integration of that in order for it to have a real effect in our lives. Writing gives that second chance to live the moment, to further that connection. Writing is the stroke that makes the ephemeral nature of life more concrete. It gives shape to the unseen.
Marie Louise Von-Franz, arguably Jungs’ greatest student, commented that she had analysands that would have a tremendous breakthrough, an astonishing realization, only to be forgotten because they could not integrate it. They could not solidify the experience. So taking that next step is crucial, whatever it is. For me that is writing, carefully formulating and crafting words. Especially in poetry where each word is thoughtfully hand picked and meticulously arranged. For me it concretizes what I think and feel. The painstaking process of searching for the right words to deliver my precise feeling makes what I feel more real within me. It takes time to put together the words, and life, that can translate our soul.
This blog is another step in integrating and solidifying what I have learned along the way. It is the outward expression of much inner work. There is a poetry to it, integrating all that I have been learning into living by writing it down. There is a flow. I find just the right information or idea at just the right time. I hope this finds you and gives you something you need. Something new or different to think about, a new way of journaling, or just an idea of how to connect more deeply with who you really are and what you really want.
Here’s to discovering the unique poetry of your soul, whatever it may be.
kb
