Dear Readers,
Each week, I facilitate small writing groups where we practice getting into creative flow. We begin each session with the same prompt, “Right now, I am…” which helps us come into the present moment and start moving our pens without thinking too hard.
For me, the prompt tends to bring me into to the physical, sensory and imaginative spaces of the writing process itself. Each of the following ten pieces were generated from the prompt “Right now, I am…” in various writing groups over the past several months.
I
Right now, I am holding a black pen. It rests between the index finger, middle finger and thumb of my right hand. My fingertips gently press against the shaft at ninety-degree angles from one another, holding the pen in place like the small screws that work together to suspend from the ceiling the bell-shaped frosted glass light fixture that softens the incandescent glow, diffusing it over the room and over the page. Beneath it all, the ring finger, the fourth screw, the bearer of the relentless downward pressure of the decades of pens and the decades of thoughts that have flowed through them. Formed to the task of holding, its callus stands proud like a tiny mountain peak, brought to life by the bodily forces that push out into the world in the precise places where the world pushes against it.
II
Right now, I am drawing tiny pictures. Scribbles that gesture this way and that, thin strokes of ink that slant and slash, loop and double-back, curve and cavort, stretch upward and outward, form letters that link to one another like they’re holding hands, like garments sharing a clothespin on a line until the intimacy of physical touch forms bigger pictures—full words full of color and meaning. And then, the pauses—the empty spaces, unmarked and left alone—open intervals that must be crossed before the pen tip strikes down to initiate the next picture, already preparing to reach beyond its own edges and merge with something much larger than itself. And by now, by the miracle of creation, these small one-inch long bits of life are joining together to say something!
III
Right now, I am wondering: Where do words come from? From the pen or from my hand? From my mind or from my desire? How shall I write about the place without words? As the ground shifts from this word into the next, I leap over unknowns and unknowables. The stream of words is full of interruptions and switchbacks. Things do not go as I thought they would, nor, I suspect, as they seem to go. The ruled lines belie the twisted path. Beneath the ground of the page is a churning undercurrent, always there and always obscured by the words of the surface world. I am writing blind, in faith that as I walk and allow my pen and my tongue to string together these strangest of symbols, that with each step and each word I am cultivating both an inner stability and a deeper knowing that my balance can only be found through the lurches and stumbles, through the willful act of moving in the dark.
IV
Right now, I am writing in faith. Faith in the simple act of laying words down on a line, one after another. Faith that what emerges will reveal something I haven’t yet seen, or, better yet, something an unknown part of me has been longing to see. Faith that the flow of words will lead me into new sequences and connections, into the delight of new insight and thrill of new forward momentum. Faith that as I move my pen across the horizontal lines of the page, the horizon itself is moving beyond my ability to see it.
V
Right now, my hand is following the gravitational pull of a deeper foundation. Water running downhill. My pen plumbs the strangeness of my psyche, across and down, across and down, not to solve the puzzle of a complicated internal landscape, but to penetrate the hard topsoil and to find the richer earth where the material of my inner life forms passageways that point in the direction of a hidden beauty. As the pen skips down the line, it momentarily lifts off the page and sails across the interstitial space between words and worlds before touching down again—in sync with the eternal dance of rising and falling, of coalescing and dissolving, of appearing and disappearing.
VI
Right now, I am laying this sequence of words down along neatly ruled lines arranged in pale printed rows of charcoal gray. Each line is a floor and a ceiling to bounded channels a quarter inch wide. I watch the words flow rightward across eight inches of ground before my hand drops and carriage-returns back to the left, where the procession continues, traipsing along, skipping left to right, over and over again. I am wrangling something vast and boundless and squeezing it into narrow spaces. Yet, words—like all abstractions—resist containment and will move beyond the bounded space to break the well-ordered grid in the moment order is enforced. Ps and gs puncture the baseline and drop below ground-level; the ascending arms of the ls and the ds and the fs reach for the line above. Some letters pair and become one, flowing into each other in a singular, fluid gesture like two dancers with hands joined in a seamless bond: gs dip and loop into the tight curl of their troughs, whereupon they rocket themselves with roller coaster speed into the skyward arm of the hs in sudden flourish—and now, the pen is singing. How I delight when I write the word right or might or fight or flight!
VII
Right now, I am zooming in on the thin black edge of the next stroke of the next letter. It’s an f. F for flourish, f for flow, f for failing and falling, f for funny, f for ffffffff, the way the air leaves my mouth through top teeth that press gently against my lower lip, where invisible lines of breath pass through the smallest spaces and trail out to tell truths and lies and disappear in the moment of their telling. No, I am not myself, not the one writing these lines, holding this pen, telling you this.
VIII
Right now, I am not myself. I am something here, and something hidden. I am pulling myself up from below the surface. I am the force of gravity drawing the ink down the cylinder and into the nib. When pen touches paper, I am the reflection, the mirror image of something being coaxed up from beneath the page—or, am I the one coaxed? I am the ink; the paper; the pulling up; the drawing down. I am the continuity.
IX
Right now, I am precisely here and moving away from here. I am riding this thin black line, and as I become very small, the line thickens and raises itself from the flat surface of the page and comes into higher relief and allows me to run my fingers along it as though it were a twisted handrail in perpetual change of direction, endlessly combining strokes and letters and words and phrases and sentences, some of which run on and on and on without end—like this one—while the pen flits and lights and digs into the surface like a plow, scoring the page and leaving calligraphic furrows in its wake that instantly pool with ink and that from above appear as neat and linear channels of containment, an appearance that down here in the garden of creation, collapses into contours that thicken and flare out into jagged saw blade fractals and contrail clouds, expanding and advancing on the absorbent fibers of the paper, endlessly articulating and reaching out into the material ground of empty space—and the pen, flying on.
X
Right now, the ink shines as it leaves its dark well and moves into the light. In the momentarily wet surface, I see my reflection. A split second; the black liquid soaks into the paper. Ink dries quick, the sheen disappears, and so do I. The moment is gone. Right now, I am going to complete this sentence.
Announcements:
Healing The Father Wound Online Course
I am happy to announce that after over a year of writing, piloting and fine tuning, Healing The Father Wound, a 10-lesson audio course now available on two online platforms: DailyOM and Insight Timer. What’s the difference? DailyOM is a browser-based online course platform, and includes written content, journal prompts and a community discussion board (a place to connect with other students and myself). Insight Timer is an app (it’s known primarily as a meditation app), and students in the course can ask questions of me, which I answer with audio notes. I am thrilled to share with you that after a month, over a thousand people have enrolled in the course.
New Six-week Writing Group - begins Friday, Aug 4
Writing Group is an intimate, low-stakes and beginner-friendly experience of getting into creative flow with words. We write together (on Zoom) for ten minutes, share what we wrote, and repeat. If you are interested in tapping into your creativity and developing your voice in a supportive community, consider joining a writing group. And if you’re interested but the timing of this group doesn’t work for you, I highly recommend checking out Jonathan Neely’s writing groups.