"The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.” ―Georgia O'Keeffe
Visceral Self | Writing Through the Body: Week Nine | Breathe | The Peace of Wild Things
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Wed June 5, 8:30 AM Write-In (paid)
🕯️Wed June 12, 8 PM CT, Candlelight Yoga Nidra (founding)
🕯️Fri June 21, 1 PM CT, Celebratory Live Solstice Salon w/open mic (founding)
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Next WITD Write-In on Wed June 5! For some reason, this one was not on our post headers last week or yesterday, sorry about that! But it’s on the calendar and we can’t wait to write with you again. (Thanks to all who attended our second-ever Write-In last week, it was outstanding!)
I have long loved Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” I’m sure many of you know it, and maybe you love it, too. Or maybe not? I appreciate when people feel differently about a poem than I do, because I always learn from those discussions—I find great value in the spaces between us, when we enter those spaces with curiosity and respect and love. This is what makes the WITD comments section so amazing.
But back to the poem—it is, for me, near perfect. And this idea of a “near perfect poem” is of great interest to me at present, because of a top-secret writing project I’ve been immersed in that I cannot wait to tell you about, but which in the meantime is challenging me in all the best ways while also showing me in absolute stark relief the extent of my own creative limitations.
How humbling! Also, what a gift!
And what even greater solace I then draw now from resting in Berry’s peace of wild things. I find this poem a powerful talisman against the very real “forethought of grief” to which I have been so prone throughout my life. I know now that when I was a child, forethought of grief protected me, kept me vigilant, kept me as safe as possible in an unsafe world by helping me to stay on my so-called toes amongst unpredictably violent adults. In my adulthood, however, constant forethought of grief is far less useful at best and even destructive at worst.
But of course grounding ourselves in the present moment—lying with the wood drake and coming into the peace of wild things—is no easy feat. Especially when we are nowhere near a wood drake and have no immediate access to “his beauty on the water.” Anyway, lying in the reeds with the wood drake and heron would probably be really wet and buggy. Besides, more often than not, I need to come into the peace of wild things right here in the mess of my own living room in the middle of the city, where I can hear the cars and the sirens and Frannie’s barking and the cacophony of to-dos all around me.
That’s why I used the gorgeous O’Keeffe quote as a headline for this post—you see, I love that she acknowledges how bones and death are also part of what is beautiful and even “keenly alive” in nature. This speaks to a I concept I call “ugly/beautiful,” which I see as essential to the best writing, and to the best living—it has to do with juxtaposition of incongruity, just as it sounds like it would, but it also has to do with striving to see and experience and write what is, rather than what we think/perceive about what is. In other words, it has to do with trying really hard to see the world as it is, instead of as we are. In seeing the world as it is, we can ultimately see a truer reflection of ourselves than we will see if we superimpose our own image on the world (which we are surprisingly prone to do).
All this is harder than it sounds. It’s something like the old adage about meditating with a fly in the room. I won’t tell you the adage, because I know you already know.
So, this—the ability to breathe into the here and now, breathe into the home of my body and its place in this world at this moment in this place—is fundamental to the work of embodied writing (as well as to embodied living, which of course is part and parcel).
Therefore, in this ninth week of our twelve-week Visceral Self intensive for embodied writing—after our incredible work last week with the third-eye chakra—we shall pause again, as we did in Week Five, to breathe and settle, breathe and attend, breathe and reflect.
I really look forward to our conversation this week. Next week, we’ll enter the crown chakra, and in weeks Eleven and Twelve, we’ll work to integrate all we’ve covered and accomplished, and I’ll be offering you options for creating something whole/larger from what you’ve written so far. So, this week would also be a good time to look back over your snippets so far and start looking for possibility.
What is possibility? I don’t know—you’ll just feel it when it is there. Sometimes, I think possibility is when the snippets are “talking to each other.” Sometimes, I think it’s when one or two snippets want to marry themselves into a single, bigger thing. Sometimes, it’s something else. We have to watch and listen for it, is all I know.
Meanwhile, before we dive into this week’s work, if you are new here, (as many of you are this week, thanks to my Oldster interview!), this How To Write in the Dark post will help you find your way around. If you already know everything I’m about to say about the immersive meditation guide, you can skip to the next section.
But if you don’t already know, Billie Oh has created an ever-expanding catalogue of Visceral Self audio and video offerings, now collated as a stand-alone post for founding members and provided as an easy button on every Visceral Self post, like this:
Resources in the Founding Member Immersive Meditation Guide include the whole set for the intensive so far (so for now, resources for Weeks 1-9).
Usually Billie offers video instructions on pose options and they always read the week’s poem/excerpt out loud, along the abridged version of the writing exercise, so that you can listen to both while you are in yoga pose and write immediately afterward. If you’re not using Billie’s audio, you can read the writing exercise/prompt a couple of times to yourself (out loud) before settling into the pose (if you are doing the pose), then write immediately when you come out of the pose.
Finally, Billie is also curating playlists to accompany each week’s writing activities, for those who like that kind of thing. I can’t write to music—but I wish I could.
For this week’s work, as you take a longer moment to sink even deeper into your experience of embodiment and embodied writing, I invite you to (paradoxically, perhaps!), reflect on the past nine weeks (or nine minutes, depending on how long you’ve been here in this intensive!) of writing through the body, and I’ve created some guiding questions to help you do that.