Wings in a Cage
“Leap and the net will appear.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stanford Hills was where I’d go on weekday afternoons to find a reprieve from my desk job. It was there on those rolling hills, under the mostly cloudless, hawk-filled skies, among the California oaks and rummaging squirrels, where my dream of writing was slowly maturing. It was there my first book ideas came to me and where I hatched the plan to take leap at last into the unknown. I decided to return to Europe and apply to graduate school.
Once my dream was within reach an obstacle appeared. The pain came unannounced. I had no inkling of the gradual, telescopic narrowing of my world that was about to commence. I woke up on a chilly winter morning with a throbbing headache. It was an extraordinary occurrence, as headaches had never bothered me before. This was about to change.
“There’s nothing worse than not knowing what’s causing your pain;
not understanding why it happened and what you can do to make it better.”
― Journal entry, October 14, 2019
The dendritic pulsations kept spreading until they covered every square centimeter of my head and reached down to my neck and shoulders. The doctor said that the pain was due to pinched nerves in my neck and that it would take months to reverse it, if at all possible. The prognosis was severe neuralgia that could go on for years, a skull-crushing, neck-choking cramp that would become worse if I let it make me anxious.
My dream to attend graduate school was ripening but lay beyond my grasp. I could only watch it as if through a pane of glass. The date was approaching when I needed to decide whether to move to England and follow my bliss or succumb to the slow paralysis. I decided that I had come too far to let my pain control my destiny. As the most qualified person to recast my situation, I decided to try and use this pain as an opportunity to discover something new instead of seeing it as a catastrophe. So I started to dig. And believe me, I dug deep.
“There is a mouse in my skull,
skittering within my cerebrum,
gnawing at cells.”
― Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations[1]
In Constellations, Sinéad Gleeson wrote that until we feel pleasure or pain, we don’t stop to notice the body or inquire into how it does all the things that it does so well. She started to pay attention to her body. . . “when a pain, persistent and new, began to slow me down. My body was sending panicked signals, but I could not figure out what they meant.”[2] When I attended Gleeson’s reading event at the Culture Lab, her words stirred me to tears. I walked home that night having felt validated and understood. This was the deepest connection I’ve ever felt with another writer.
The first weeks in school were difficult. There were days when it was hard to see clearly. The neuralgia that had spread into my facial muscles was starting to affect my eyes, jaw, tongue and ear canal. Deep breathing helped, as did paying undivided attention to the present moment while sending messages of peace to my brain. I noticed that when I was engaged with something that made me feel good or purposeful, such as slowly writing in my journal or listening to an author speak, the pain would diminish.
The pages of my creative journal filled up slowly. Each day would start in a daze, which had more power than writer’s block. In the beginning wrote in a bigger font, as if to convince myself that I was writing more than I really was and using the same blue pen. The writing looked cramped and austere. As weeks passed added more color to my journal writing. I also brought the tutor-set exercises from classroom to my living room to give myself more time to experiment with writing meditations, scenes and dialogues. Not one to write poetry, found myself drawn to weaving verses about physical trauma and prose about the body. It was as if my body craved to be given a voice.
“I awoke at three in the morning in a pool of cold sweat with a sharp, hollow pain in the center of my brain. Everything around me, including the bed I was on, floated and undulated. It was if I had been blasted into space and woken up on a poorly constructed version of our planet.”
― Excerpt from Life Writing exercise, October 24, 2019
Because too much thinking about random and often unnecessary things would bring on a migraine, I had a good reason to put down roots in the present. This made me become more aware of my emotional oscillations and how often they controlled my output on any given day. Rather than yielding to my moods, I learned to treat them like screaming children, gently move them to the side and keep working. This was a new discovery, since before this I had needed to do activities to put myself into a mood for writing. In this context the pain taught me how to focus more deeply and work under the surface, below the waves. This created an atmosphere of much less interruption. Because interruption, as Joyce Carol Oates will tell you, is “the great enemy of writing.”[3]
With time, writing in spite of my moods grew into something akin to a habit. In the words of Kenneth Atchity, it was as simple as making a decision. “Almost any decision will do because the purpose of the decision is simply to get the process started, and the process doesn’t start until some decision has been made.”[4] This worked well for me, as did switching my journal practice from jotting down daily records to writing in scenes and images. Donald Hall affirmed the value of this practice by writing “Little entries that set out our daily schedule do not help us. Better are memories, whole anecdotes, ideas and queries.”[5] It took me some time and effort to switch from reflective writing to conveying ideas with imagery. Practicing it in a journal was helpful, since it was a territory that I kept free from scrutiny and judgment.
“I look at the empty bowl sitting on a small plastic table next to me and become aware of two things: 1) how much I dislike this table despite its obvious utility and 2) how unless I put water in the bowl soon, the starch from the potatoes I just ate will get crusty and make it hard to wash.”
― Journal entry, October 21, 2019
Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: Women at Work became my self-help bible. It brought me relief to know that I was not the only one (obviously!) struggling with nailing down a consistent work routine. Isak Dinesen would write at night to get her mind “off the things which in the daytime it had gone over a hundred times.”[6] The fruit of her nightly reveries became Out of Africa. Louise Nevelson “could work two, three days and not sleep,”[7] and Josephine Baker “was plagued by nightmares and insomnia.”[8] Still, I had no illusions. As Pina Bausch once said, “Yes, discipline is important. You simply have to keep working and suddenly something emerges—something very small.”[9]
So I kept going. Writing for the sake of it and a little more each day—before class, after class, on weekends and sometimes in the middle of the night. Releasing expectations. Releasing control. Learning to trust the process. In the dance with my pain I let myself fall apart a little. And from the cracks something started to emerge. I became more grounded in my writing, since I could now understand suffering. Instead of mostly dwelling in the sphere of fiction and high-flown fantasies, my stories and short pieces became more realistic and raw.
Other things changed as well. Before I fell ill I had a routine. Up before 8 am. Impeccable order. Every pen had its place. Here in Newcastle a random visitor would not have been able to find a place to sit. My living room floor and sofa were crowded with piles of open books, lecture notes and cups of cold tea. I was rarely up before 11 am or in bed before midnight. I was making friends with creative chaos.
Albert Einstein once said that “creativity is intelligence having fun.” Staying with the celestial theme, I’d add that besides being generative, creativity is also gravitational. In other words, the more we practice creativity and the more momentum we build, the more energy, ideas, and I even venture to add, creative coincidences we draw to ourselves. In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about attracting Muses, “invisible, psychic forces that support us in our journey toward ourselves.”[10] In his words, we show respect by showing up. “When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens.”[11]
Since beginning the course I’ve been fortunate to experience what Pressfield writes about and I cherish those encounters with pure inspiration. But it was not so much the visiting Muse but the daily commitment to write that gave me sufficient impetus to expand my creative process. Daily writing also helped me challenge the belief that my pain was here to stay and stood in the way of my dreams. Nothing now stands in the way.
“If we change the way we look at things,
the things we look at change.”
― Dr. Wayne Dyer
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stanford Hills was where I’d go on weekday afternoons to find a reprieve from my desk job. It was there on those rolling hills, under the mostly cloudless, hawk-filled skies, among the California oaks and rummaging squirrels, where my dream of writing was slowly maturing. It was there my first book ideas came to me and where I hatched the plan to take leap at last into the unknown. I decided to return to Europe and apply to graduate school.
Once my dream was within reach an obstacle appeared. The pain came unannounced. I had no inkling of the gradual, telescopic narrowing of my world that was about to commence. I woke up on a chilly winter morning with a throbbing headache. It was an extraordinary occurrence, as headaches had never bothered me before. This was about to change.
“There’s nothing worse than not knowing what’s causing your pain;
not understanding why it happened and what you can do to make it better.”
― Journal entry, October 14, 2019
The dendritic pulsations kept spreading until they covered every square centimeter of my head and reached down to my neck and shoulders. The doctor said that the pain was due to pinched nerves in my neck and that it would take months to reverse it, if at all possible. The prognosis was severe neuralgia that could go on for years, a skull-crushing, neck-choking cramp that would become worse if I let it make me anxious.
My dream to attend graduate school was ripening but lay beyond my grasp. I could only watch it as if through a pane of glass. The date was approaching when I needed to decide whether to move to England and follow my bliss or succumb to the slow paralysis. I decided that I had come too far to let my pain control my destiny. As the most qualified person to recast my situation, I decided to try and use this pain as an opportunity to discover something new instead of seeing it as a catastrophe. So I started to dig. And believe me, I dug deep.
“There is a mouse in my skull,
skittering within my cerebrum,
gnawing at cells.”
― Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations[1]
In Constellations, Sinéad Gleeson wrote that until we feel pleasure or pain, we don’t stop to notice the body or inquire into how it does all the things that it does so well. She started to pay attention to her body. . . “when a pain, persistent and new, began to slow me down. My body was sending panicked signals, but I could not figure out what they meant.”[2] When I attended Gleeson’s reading event at the Culture Lab, her words stirred me to tears. I walked home that night having felt validated and understood. This was the deepest connection I’ve ever felt with another writer.
The first weeks in school were difficult. There were days when it was hard to see clearly. The neuralgia that had spread into my facial muscles was starting to affect my eyes, jaw, tongue and ear canal. Deep breathing helped, as did paying undivided attention to the present moment while sending messages of peace to my brain. I noticed that when I was engaged with something that made me feel good or purposeful, such as slowly writing in my journal or listening to an author speak, the pain would diminish.
The pages of my creative journal filled up slowly. Each day would start in a daze, which had more power than writer’s block. In the beginning wrote in a bigger font, as if to convince myself that I was writing more than I really was and using the same blue pen. The writing looked cramped and austere. As weeks passed added more color to my journal writing. I also brought the tutor-set exercises from classroom to my living room to give myself more time to experiment with writing meditations, scenes and dialogues. Not one to write poetry, found myself drawn to weaving verses about physical trauma and prose about the body. It was as if my body craved to be given a voice.
“I awoke at three in the morning in a pool of cold sweat with a sharp, hollow pain in the center of my brain. Everything around me, including the bed I was on, floated and undulated. It was if I had been blasted into space and woken up on a poorly constructed version of our planet.”
― Excerpt from Life Writing exercise, October 24, 2019
Because too much thinking about random and often unnecessary things would bring on a migraine, I had a good reason to put down roots in the present. This made me become more aware of my emotional oscillations and how often they controlled my output on any given day. Rather than yielding to my moods, I learned to treat them like screaming children, gently move them to the side and keep working. This was a new discovery, since before this I had needed to do activities to put myself into a mood for writing. In this context the pain taught me how to focus more deeply and work under the surface, below the waves. This created an atmosphere of much less interruption. Because interruption, as Joyce Carol Oates will tell you, is “the great enemy of writing.”[3]
With time, writing in spite of my moods grew into something akin to a habit. In the words of Kenneth Atchity, it was as simple as making a decision. “Almost any decision will do because the purpose of the decision is simply to get the process started, and the process doesn’t start until some decision has been made.”[4] This worked well for me, as did switching my journal practice from jotting down daily records to writing in scenes and images. Donald Hall affirmed the value of this practice by writing “Little entries that set out our daily schedule do not help us. Better are memories, whole anecdotes, ideas and queries.”[5] It took me some time and effort to switch from reflective writing to conveying ideas with imagery. Practicing it in a journal was helpful, since it was a territory that I kept free from scrutiny and judgment.
“I look at the empty bowl sitting on a small plastic table next to me and become aware of two things: 1) how much I dislike this table despite its obvious utility and 2) how unless I put water in the bowl soon, the starch from the potatoes I just ate will get crusty and make it hard to wash.”
― Journal entry, October 21, 2019
Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: Women at Work became my self-help bible. It brought me relief to know that I was not the only one (obviously!) struggling with nailing down a consistent work routine. Isak Dinesen would write at night to get her mind “off the things which in the daytime it had gone over a hundred times.”[6] The fruit of her nightly reveries became Out of Africa. Louise Nevelson “could work two, three days and not sleep,”[7] and Josephine Baker “was plagued by nightmares and insomnia.”[8] Still, I had no illusions. As Pina Bausch once said, “Yes, discipline is important. You simply have to keep working and suddenly something emerges—something very small.”[9]
So I kept going. Writing for the sake of it and a little more each day—before class, after class, on weekends and sometimes in the middle of the night. Releasing expectations. Releasing control. Learning to trust the process. In the dance with my pain I let myself fall apart a little. And from the cracks something started to emerge. I became more grounded in my writing, since I could now understand suffering. Instead of mostly dwelling in the sphere of fiction and high-flown fantasies, my stories and short pieces became more realistic and raw.
Other things changed as well. Before I fell ill I had a routine. Up before 8 am. Impeccable order. Every pen had its place. Here in Newcastle a random visitor would not have been able to find a place to sit. My living room floor and sofa were crowded with piles of open books, lecture notes and cups of cold tea. I was rarely up before 11 am or in bed before midnight. I was making friends with creative chaos.
Albert Einstein once said that “creativity is intelligence having fun.” Staying with the celestial theme, I’d add that besides being generative, creativity is also gravitational. In other words, the more we practice creativity and the more momentum we build, the more energy, ideas, and I even venture to add, creative coincidences we draw to ourselves. In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about attracting Muses, “invisible, psychic forces that support us in our journey toward ourselves.”[10] In his words, we show respect by showing up. “When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens.”[11]
Since beginning the course I’ve been fortunate to experience what Pressfield writes about and I cherish those encounters with pure inspiration. But it was not so much the visiting Muse but the daily commitment to write that gave me sufficient impetus to expand my creative process. Daily writing also helped me challenge the belief that my pain was here to stay and stood in the way of my dreams. Nothing now stands in the way.
“If we change the way we look at things,
the things we look at change.”
― Dr. Wayne Dyer
***
CITATION LINKS
[1] Gleeson Sinéad, Constellations, (London: Picador, 2019), p. 158
[2] Gleeson Sinéad, Constellations, (London: Picador, 2019), p. 1
[3] Mesure Susie, Joyce Carol Oates: The Great Enemy of Writing is Interruption, (inews.co.uk, 21 December 2018)
[4] Atchity Kenneth, A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 5
[5] Donald Hall, Writing Well, 6th edn. (Illinois: Scott, Foresman/Little Brown College Division, 1988) p. 18
[6] Currey Mason, Daily Rituals: Women at Work, (New York: Picador, 2019) p. 23
[7] Ibid, p. 19
[8] Ibid, p. 25
[9] Ibid, p. 9
[10] Pressfield Steven, The War of Art, (New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002) p. 106
[11] Ibid, p. 123
[1] Gleeson Sinéad, Constellations, (London: Picador, 2019), p. 158
[2] Gleeson Sinéad, Constellations, (London: Picador, 2019), p. 1
[3] Mesure Susie, Joyce Carol Oates: The Great Enemy of Writing is Interruption, (inews.co.uk, 21 December 2018)
[4] Atchity Kenneth, A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 5
[5] Donald Hall, Writing Well, 6th edn. (Illinois: Scott, Foresman/Little Brown College Division, 1988) p. 18
[6] Currey Mason, Daily Rituals: Women at Work, (New York: Picador, 2019) p. 23
[7] Ibid, p. 19
[8] Ibid, p. 25
[9] Ibid, p. 9
[10] Pressfield Steven, The War of Art, (New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002) p. 106
[11] Ibid, p. 123
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