Environmental Action LLC Blog

In collaboration with Environmental Studies Program

Of Writing Itself

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When life woke me up in pain at 2am, the hushed world was gifting me its quiet dreamscape as a canvas for tender contemplation. And it also meant that thoughts were falling together like swirling raindrops blown in from distant clouds: that is, rather incongruously. So do bear with me as you might be following along.

I have picked up Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke.

 

“It is only by living in the world that you acquire the ability to represent it. I am addicted to artists’ residencies, to sequestering myself to concentrate, to the vision that comes in silence, to Rilke’s vaunted solitude—but not to the exclusion of the engagement that gives you things to say. Try not to let your words outstrip your experience.”

Passion — a deep partaking in the richness of life — most naturally happens when I free my mind of thought with a paintbrush and canvas, dive into waters for a long swim, rock climb with a meditative mind, sit down with a mantra, or just stare at the passing clouds until I tap once again into the energetic systems of Earth and feel eternally content. It happens when I neglect the tick-tock of time’s governance, usually unintentionally.

 

I don’t desire to live in a world of non-ado bliss; A sense of purpose, and the risk-taking action which enlivens it, are just as necessary to developing and enjoying the experience of passion as are periodic experiences of unstructured creative spaces. Achieve a balance, anyone mildly wise in the Art of Life would tell you. Find a way to do what you’re passionate about in your “work.” Of course, all work, however fueled by life’s purpose initially, can turn into something one feels medially engaged in; spicing it up requires taking on new challenges, provoking new opportunities, and keeping healthy in other realms of living. Not to mention just jolting oneself awake with a good dose of gratitude for existence every so often.

 

In the college whirlwind — this Palatine Hill “thought bubble” I occupy — are my engagements really engaging me? Are they controlling me, or I them? Where has my “vaunted solitude” disappeared to but into these few wee hours of the morn? Rushing about, I’m doing things I proclaim to love; yet less and less, I fail to remember to love them. How do I remember to love learning, to explore creative space and thoughts, when I am so committed to a calendar schedule?

 

The balance of living and recording is a tender and fluctuating reciprocal. The practice of being presently engaged throughout it all is an unremitting challenge — rather, opportunity. I am okay with not engaging in compulsive publication because I love just being in tune with my own presence and letting it guide my interaction with the world.  Mistakes and shame are transformed into accepted misalignments and learning to laugh at myself. Perhaps this sounds like a bunch of hullaballoo, and maybe it is. And in no way have I mastered this way of living. Actually, I’m having difficulty with this College’s structural demands because it is leaving me too exhausted and strung-out to engage with the world from the place of appreciation I normally do. Sometimes I wonder where the illusion lies: Was it in my old state of non-awareness or my current learnéd state of descriptive and critical awareness?

If both … what was that space that I got a taste of occupying during my many months of living abroad in rural Ecuador before coming here to college [I took a gap year] … when I was in touch with a slower pace with just as rich with fulfillment and knowledge because I was listening deeply, with intuitive presence, to the Earth? But admittedly, there I was not acting with passion because I wasn’t doing as much as I had been trained to want to do within this American culture.

I think passion is also about keeping alive the dreamscape of the extraordinary to let it inform how I work with the otherwise ordinary. A friend posed to me — or maybe himself, but I was present — the question: Why believe in immortality, and the what if, if it’s just not true? Although I don’t consider myself delusional, I do think that infusing passion in life and life into my passions necessitates a certain non-acceptance of the way things are; It is by stepping just outside the boundaries of “what is true” to imagine a little bit of what could be from which creative actualization is born. This means living a little bit in the dream state (try: synthesizing thoughts at 4am).

I don’t function with a belief in immortality, but I do see truth of immortality amidst our mortal (and still quite ignorant) world. Profound works of art and music and prose have lasted centuries; An old acquaintance remarked recently, reflecting on her translation of Julius Caesar from ancient Latin to modern English, that she was humbled in a comedic way when an analogy he had made comparing squirting blood vessels to broken water lines was transmitted as a comprehensible analogy across millennia. And although I maintain a sense of self and personal boundary, I recognize that “I” am a creative work of the ideas and genetics of others. Although it can be frightening and strange to occupy these dimensions of possibility, it can also ignite a way of being that is, if a little stranger, more pragmatically opportunistic.

I strive to balance these intentions:
1. Taking care of simple tasks with a sense of purposeful presence and gratitude
2. Finding space to do what I (am pretty sure) I’m passionate about 
3. Opening up creative, unstructured and meditative time to release the rush of my mind
4. Sitting with myself in written and artistic reflection, creating representative artwork of my Life Experience
Only one of those elements is the intentional manifestation of remembered time into spatial record. That is, mostly I just live and occasionally I remember to journal and take snapshots. I’m feeling good about it thus far, as long as I remember to engage truly in both.

 

Here’s one last nugget of wisdom from the poet Rilke, for he found words of expression far more carefully than I:
“Depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and beliefs in some kind of beauty—depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity; and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

One day I, too, might publish my poems.Perhaps making art of life, in any lyrical, prosaic or spatial medium, is the zenith of passionate work.

[The featured image is a snapshot of my book.]