Desperately Seeking...
...a new outlook or approach or attitude toward the creative writing life I said I wanted and have been trying to lead, to make my primary focus this past seven or eight years. This realization after a week in the rain forest on the east shore of Maui in a solar-powered cottage with rain water gathered for showers and water pumped from a stream in the gulch for every other need. After a week of simple, calm, peaceful, non-striving living in between bouts of run-around touring in the rental car—beaches, the north coast, the road to Hana, Haleakala at 10,000+ feet. So what does this have to do with writing?
I came back home, to western Oregon, and immediately felt turned off, almost repulsed, at the state-of-the-art, at what it takes to get one's words and one's voice out there. The turn-off was exemplified by inbox e-mails from poetry competitions and writing websites and the latest rejection from the Oregonian Sunday poetry column. So much ego to get one's preciously crafted words out there and then what? Who reads them anyway? Those are the immediate return-to-my-reality thoughts I had.
What if I stopped, stepped outside what I thought I wanted and took a completely different view? Dug deep down to sort out why it is I thought I wanted to speak and be heard. Found some way to connect in a moral, meaningful way with community that is somehow outside or beyond the very tiny world I continue to believe I inhabit sitting here alone, at this desk, fiddling around with words.
I had hoped to do such soul-searching during the time we were in Maui. But instead, it was the wind, the sound of the afternoon windward rains on the palm fronds. And it was the moon, full and rising over the slopes of Haleakala. And it was the stars—more than I've ever seen before because there is so little electric light and no power poles on our side of the island. And the sun, setting then rising, and us too, getting up with it as the light returned each and every day. While there, I wrote in my journal more than once that I felt words were failing me or perhaps I was failing the words. But maybe it really isn't either. Words had somehow fallen out—of favor, of my ego-need to record without fail what my tiny window-on-the-world self was experiencing. Words—and my often desperate engagement with them—somehow moved from center to the sidelines, lost their allure, their luster and sheen as I moved from doing into being. For me, there was a divine contentment in simply that.
So now what? And what next? How to get outside the ego that often fuels the artistic endeavor? Is meditation the only way? And then how to write what I want, what tells my story, my truth and not feel disappointed or depressed about the state of the art, the state of recognition in the corporate-dominated publishing world of today? Or how to embrace other media, other art forms, if the words fail me or I fail the words? It isn't necessarily an all or nothing, rather a continuum. How to explore and move forward with that?
