“The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself.” –Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream
We all process the world in different ways. The way that feels most natural, healing, and exciting to me is writing stories.
I don’t write to be recognized or to make something happen for someone else, but to experience truth in my own individual way. By listening to what Life is saying to me, and by crafting the stories that I’ve lived, I experience deeply. This includes welcoming and writing the stories that arise in my mind through imagination, and considering the possibilities I’ve almost lived, as well as what I’ve observed in the lives of others. All these things help me see, feel, touch, taste, and hear my life–through story, experiencing past, present, and future.
What’s so beautiful about creating art with stories and words is that it doesn’t have to make sense; my brain doesn’t have to calculate answers. And yet there’s a rightness, a rhythm, a pattern in each piece. Words are the vehicle. Stories transcend words, conveying deep understanding.
It’s really about the images and senses we exchange as we make and share these stories and chapters and flashes and poems.
If writing is one of your ways of understanding, of finding deep knowing, I invite you to really get this writing groove on: be affirmed, be supported, find a few hours a week to feel the wonder of exploring the universe in your own, unique, word-full and yet beyond-words way.
Wildfire Writing, a virtual class offered through Clark College, will be offered privately this summer beginning June 16.
This is your highest value for the money, and can launch you into an entirely new way of feeling into your life.
Photo credits: Top: Brett Mott, Bottom: L. Feather
