DOTR Lesson 3: Awen and Creative Work

My work with Lesson 3: Awen is, I think, almost at an end. I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked writing poetry and doing "actual creative work," but there's no doubt that I've been feeling the influx of inspiration lately and, in particular, changing some of the ways I've been thinking about creativity and creative approaches to soul-work and career in particular.

The "creative project" for Lesson 3 will undoubtedly take much longer than a few weeks, so I'm pretty comfortable moving on to the next lesson while continuing that creative work. I had been anticipating being able to spend more time sitting and writing poetry, but what has demanded my attention — practically forcing its way to the forefront this past month — is work on my website and, by extension, what I'm now coming to call my "author platform." A lot of the work that I've been doing on the wedding planning end of things has led me to reevaluate my expectations about what I'm capable of accomplishing. When it came to planning a wedding, I assumed that (a) we didn't have the money to hire a professional wedding planner, (b) tons of people manage to plan a wedding without a professional planner every year, (c) no one else was going to step up and plan my wedding if I didn't (especially not the way Jeff and I wanted it), and (d) I most obviously had the skills to do it right — in fact, to make it fantastic! Yet all this time, I've been looking at folks who present workshops, give lecturers, teach classes and in general rock the professional writer scene and thought to myself, "I could never do that! I'm just an introverted, shy type of writer-recluse who will just have to settle for being amazing yet amazingly obscure." But why? I can't imagine that preparing a talk or presentation is all that much more intimidating that planning and hosting an event for about a hundred people.... And I managed to break the latter down into a manageable goal that I could work up to a bit at a time. So, why not the other?

That's my inherent elitism coming out. I really do think that part of me assumed that I could handle planning a wedding because lots of people do it all the time without any special prep work or qualifications, and I am way more competent than lots of people even without any experience or credentials. But thinking about becoming an "expert" on something, enough for a book I wrote to be taken seriously, to have the authority of Author.... was not something I could imagine for myself. I didn't know how people became "experts" at the very same time that I was still busy thinking that most of the "experts" out there these days weren't nearly as thoughtful or intelligent as I can be. So I was working this neurotic double standard that kept me expectations far higher than perhaps they should have been while secretly harboring snarky suspicions about people who managed to be professionally successful... which just became an excuse for me to stay in the shadows and always be in the process of "working on my book" without ever finishing one.

Now I'm seeing that creative work is not limited to what I put down on the page. It's also about crafting a professional career, and that's a beautiful thing! There's no job out there that's made perfectly just for me, that I get to just step into and start earning a paycheck — precisely because any pre-made job opening couldn't be suited precisely to me and my needs. Instead, I get to engage in the creative process of making my own job, composed of the various tasks and interactions that I'm most interested in pursuing. But if I can bring a sense of professionalism to a job like waitressing, I'll be damned if I can't live up to the "professional" side of being a professional writer.

And what really brought it home for me was how I have, for some people, come to be considered an "extremist," and how out-of-control and unjust my online presence suddenly seemed to have become. Whining about misunderstandings or the limits of the medium seemed silly when I thought back to the craft of poetry when I was first learning it, and forgoing the whining of "readers just don't get me" and instead buckling down to the hard work of making my writing more accessible and clear. My online persona — my "author platform" online and in person — is not who I am at the deepest level, it is a creative work just as much as a piece of writing is, and if I feel that it's not getting through, then I have at least a large part of the responsibility to listen, to attend, to practice and respond and shape my craft so that it does.

So that's my big creative project for this lesson, and one that will continue to play a major role in the months and years to come. The biggest part of that right now is launching a new website, and leaving behind the Meadowsweet & Myrrh space. Ever since upgrading to the new design, trying to tweak and change and incorporate the kinds of features and widgets I wanted, that space has started to feel more cluttered, too messy and small to meet my needs. The more direct control over the layout and design of this new website is already making a world of difference, though I wouldn't be surprised if it needs to be revamped in the future. It will also be more sustainable in terms of the organization of blog updates, giving up the linear model for one that is more expansive, which will relieve the pressure to constantly update with new amazingly mind-blowingly awesome posts — which in turn will free up my energies to devote elsewhere, to other aspects of my writing. The website will be a good home base for my author identity even if I'm not constantly updating it (because, honestly, I don't think my personality is cut out for daily updates... I can't even sustain it in a private forum like this blog).

So I've been kept up at night several times over the last few weeks, with brain-storms roiling and thundering behind my closed eyes as I imagine all the possibilities and find myself getting more and more excited by it. Understanding that I need to narrow down my goals and set some reasonable, reachable ones (and, as one writer I read recently put it, being able to distinguish between "prolific" and "productive" in a way that frees me a bit from the pressures of guilt and perfectionism)... it's all very awesome. I look at how in two years time I was able to quadruple my readers for Meadowsweet just with a fumbling, haphazard approach in the midst of big life changes, and I imagine just what I could accomplish with an organized approach with clearer goals and a deeper insight into who I want to be as an author. Was it less than a year ago that I was thrilled to even be mentioned on The Wild Hunt? And now I've guest posted there, I have regular interactions with Jason (and frankly, because I'm elitist, I find that he's not all the hot shit I thought he was originally and there are actually things about his approach that I disagree with him about), and in general I feel perfectly comfortable considering myself part of that "in crowd." And all the while, my expectations for what I can accomplish always outstrip my current success (the old phenomenon I mentioned to Carl last time we saw him: I might have huge admiration for a publication or publisher.... until they accept and print my work, and then I figure they must not have been all that good or picky after all. Is this elitism or low self-esteem?).

I figure, if my expectations are always based on the next biggest success marker, then that might actually be a good thing — something that challenges me to keep pushing and stretching and growing — as long as I don't use it as an excuse not to try at all or to give up too soon. I recently found out that one of my favorite words — attending, which I love for its triple connotation of presence, focus and service — comes from a Latin root meaning "to stretch towards." This is what I want. I don't want to be hedged in by trolls and nay-sayers, I want to stretch towards that dream-self I can imagine myself as being, and find ways to make her my reality. She doesn't let trolls define her or pull her off track: she has a gift, and she shares it, and she seeks out those who will be receptive and makes a point of reaching out to them. And those who aren't receptive? Love will find its own way out: water through ice, root through rock.

DOTR Lesson 3: Awen and Creative Work

The Killing Blow

Call me the name of peace
as though it were a curse,
and I will bless you, saying,
Yes, and I will lift up
the white flower of cowardice
and trembling, I will lift up that blossom
the color of snow and ocean foam
and moonlight, cloud and empty wind
and bone. I will lift it up with these hands
worn and worried with bickering,
limp with the luxury of blood,
the hands I inherited from my ancestors
whose bones, too, are white beneath the mud.
The goddess of war climbs the mountain's peak,
the hard, pale sunlight like the whites of her eyes.
Wonder, too, is a kind of power.
What curse she lays on the wearied earth, saying,
Yes, and Peace, and other fearful things.
The hills grow soft, will not be rushed
as last year's dead lift up
the small, white blossoms of the spring.

Diary

Days of Note: First Quarter White Waking Moon

Sun: aquarius (air/fixed), 7:19am - 5:50pm
Moon: *first quarter, gemini (air/mutable)
Earth: just below freezing, with gentle winds and gentle sun, but still very much winter despite the first hinting stirrings of spring


Today, my second "day off" of the week, I woke up at 6:30 AM wide awake. Of course, it being still dark and Jeff being pretty much sound asleep, I didn't bother to actually get up. Still, I was full of energy and excitement about the day. Most likely because it was my "day off" and I was eager to get back to what I'd been working on my last "day off," Wedding Wednesday — which I spent, not on wedding stuff as I should have, but on taking the first steps towards designing and setting up my new website. I can become obsessive about these things. It's always been the case that a huge motivating factor for me is the appearance and packaging of a thing. That may sound shallow or superficial, but for me, part of the thrill of a beautiful piece of writing is the aesthetic pleasure of the physical book itself: the heft and weight of it, the scent of book binding glue, the neat, elegant formatting of the fonts, the cover art. And when it comes to online writing, this spills over into websites. A website can be — contrary to so much embarrassing evidence out there — elegant and beautiful and inviting, a worthy showcase of excellent work. I want my website to be like that. And so I thrill at the hours upon hours that I get to spend tweaking code and experimenting with color combinations and layout features.

When all's said and done, though, I want to be able to fill a website with awesome material. So as much as I was excited about having a day off today, I knew that I really couldn't go much further on the website design without facing the music and buckling down to some actual writing. And weirdly enough, I was dreading that. I had a restless frustration, like cabin-and/or-spring fever, that made me worry I wouldn't be able to settle down to do the creative work I wanted to do. I feel like it's been so long since I've done creative writing that really sang my soul-song. And of course, I've been feeling pressure (or, more kindly, leadings) from Brigid that I should be turning back to this work and cultivating it. Even my aspirant work with DOTR this lesson is focused on creative work and our relationship with awen, the Druid concept of inspiration, the fire-in-the-head breath of the gods. So every day I failed to write creatively, it became that much harder to have any confidence that I still had it in me.

This morning, I got in a few hours of work before lunch, and generally wasted time poking around online reading articles and blog feeds and Facebook updates that left me feeling befuddled and muddy headed. I knew I needed to give myself time and space in which to be creative, but that restlessness was keeping me from calming down. That, plus the monthly cravings for pastries and chocolate were at constant war with my commitment to the mostly-raw vegan diet Jeff and I are trying out, and the result was the weird sensation that I was... bored. Which is hard to explain. But boredom as an emotional state, and the tension of cravings for un-filling, bad-for-me food, were hardly distinguishable. So finally, in early afternoon, I decided to compromise: I had one piece of chocolate from the stash my mother sent me in a care package for Valentine's Day, and then I went downstairs and got one of my numerous How To Write Poetry workbooks (I know where they all are now, because Jeff and I have organized our bookshelves, hurrah!). I read through the introduction and the beginning of the first chapter before getting to the first exercise. Then I sat down, and I did it. I've already shared the results.

Or, at least, the product of the process. But there were other results, too. It took me hours to write that poem, hours of weighing and pushing and feeling my way through each line. Even now, I'm not sure if it's any good or not. But the process was so satisfying and restful, and something I had missed so much without even realizing it. It was work, in the best sense of the word. Not busywork to keep me churning and spinning my wheels, not time clocked or overly specific exercises leading step-by-step. It was just the work of digging and sensing and sitting quietly listening to the rhythm of each line, each word, and working my way slowly, gently, towards the poem's end. It was so satisfying, yet calming, that after dinner I felt as though I had plenty of energy and motivation, and I was eager to plunge back in. Jeff had a few hours of work left to do, since he took time out of the middle of the day to run errands before the kids come this weekend. So I buckled down to tackle some revision work I'd been meaning to do for a while.

The plan with the new website is to make it mostly a static site to showcase my writing and publications (and possibly photographs), with a blog feature incorporated to share news and smaller essays. I won't be exporting the old Meadowsweet blog into this new site, but instead I'm going ahead with my original plan to compile the best pieces from the old blog into a book to make available on Lulu (or, possibly, through a publisher, if Graeme's small publishing company will still have me). Once I began the process of selecting and compiling these pieces (which was months ago now), I realized that many of them I wanted to expand and revise, incorporating ideas that developed in the comment threads and just in general touching them up and making them more suitable for the print medium. Because I'm a perfectionist. But the task seemed so daunting, I never really got started on it.

Tonight, I sat down after dinner and began working on an expansion/revision of the first essay. It wasn't just enjoyable, it was downright fun! I felt like I was back to my old self again, revisiting the old me who was a diehard Poet-capital-P. For so long now it seems — though it can't be more than half a year at most — I've felt not so much like a writer as like.... a blogger. And I do mean that in the derogatory sense, no matter how unfair that might be. But "blogging" (as The Doctor uses it) is like chattering gossip and bickering banter about trivia and current events. I think it could be more than that, and I used to be pretty good at staying grounded in that vision of it being more than that, but my involvement with P+P has dragged me down in some ways, I think, and left me disoriented and feeling utterly drained of creative inspiration. It is so hard to take the risk of true creativity when you feel constantly under attack my insulting snipers and overly-critical know-it-alls. It's hard not to get sucked into that world, to become small. But reading back over old posts, and working on them again with this new burst of creative juices, I felt as though I were coming home to myself. I no longer had to berate myself for not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. Even if it takes a while, even if I'm not rushing off to score the instant gratification of immediate publication in a blog medium, I am doing the work, and allowing it to take however long it takes. I may end up with some material worthy of publication in magazines (though my luck there has been less than wonderful lately). Either way, I am doing the creative work I want to be doing and allowing myself to look beyond the borders of our sometimes self-involved little community of Pagans. This, I like.

So it's been a good day, and this diary entry probably reflects that. There is much to catch up on that has been going on in my life, but I'm not going to beat myself up over not doing a better job of chronicling it. That is busywork. This is creative work. I'm also not going to do the first part of the DOTR Aspirant Lesson 3 as it is written. I will not be doing daily note-taking on my plans and goals, nor doing the weird exercise of writing with one hand, then the other for a week. I suspect this last exercise is supposed to put you in touch with your more "artistic" brain, but I have far better ways of doing that on my own. Perhaps I will turn the journaling prompts into poetry-writing exercises instead and experiment with them in that way, but in general I'll be adapting the lesson to suit my needs. I'm hoping this is alright with Bob. Since he and I have known each other in one form or another for several years now, he did invite me to just join outright as a full Druid member, but I agreed to go through the lessons. In part because it's a good refresher, and in part because I wanted to understand the community sense that was developed through the lessons themselves, and in part because I hoped to be able to give Bob some feedback on the lessons themselves and ways they might be improved. We'll see how receptive he is to me blowing off the lesson plans for this month and exploring awen in my own way.



Daily Tarot Card: The King of Wands stands noble and proud, energetic and ready for action and activity. His blood flows bright and quick with passion, enthusiasm for his work, yet as the mature "yang" of the suit, he also understands the necessity of structure and order to reign his power in, harness it and shape it to his purposes. He is a figure defined by his energy and enthusiastic engagement with the world around him and the work he pursues in it. He may sometimes try to do everything at once, and for that reason to shy away from a sense of control or imposed order that might restrict him or rob him of the space his creativity needs to flourish. Yet this tension between passion and calm, creativity and order, are held delicately and deftly under his rule.

DOTR Lesson 3: Awen and Creative Work

Feeding Seagulls

I don't know how they came all that way, following the Susquehanna
into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania,
to the empty field at the end of my street where I took my father
out beneath the high, gray winds of autumn
to show him how I called the birds to me.
It wasn't hard, I told him when he asked
about the teacher's phone call, the wasted lunches, and why
I spent each recess in the field feeding gulls instead of playing with the other
kids. But I knew he couldn't understand unless I showed him.

Again, I plucked a grape and held its slick, dark shape
between two pudgy fingers — arced my arm in one smooth and mighty toss,
shoulder loose and elbow locked, the last flick of wrist sending the fruit soaring
until it disappeared against the blurry sky.
Again and again, I swung with all the longing I could send
out of my awkward, grade school body — the silent call to come, to feast,
to circle in. For a week this had gone on, me alone in the field
throwing grapes and torn bits of white bread smeared with jelly
into the air, as one, then several, then whole flocks of seagulls
gathered wheeling and quarreling around me, each silhouette two sharp
parentheses hinged around a tight, tiny body that moved like a boat
cutting through invisible waters, lazy with its breathless speed.

My father waited. Wedged between empty field and empty sky,
the mute sting of loss was creeping in. It was too late,
or too cold, or too dim in the autumn evening. I begged for him to wait
a little longer, as I tossed higher and higher, wished to god I had brought bread
instead, and dreamed with every second how the wings had sounded
against the air, the tense emptiness of those wild pilgrims
dancing and screaming around the promised offerings as they came.
I don't know how they made it all that way, so far from the shores
where my people, too, had spilled in ragged, starving flocks
against the land and staggered towards the mountains in the west.
My father turned to walk back home. Behind us, one or two gulls,
secreted away behind the clouds, dropped down on the abandoned food.

The ocean was only a story they blamed on one another,
crying over and over how they had lost it.