Abundance is not a measurement. It’s not about having things, or acquiring ‘stuff’, Epicurus tells us, but about enjoying life, delighting in the everyday pleasures that surround us. Abundance comes in those moments when we are truly alive to the present and in how we connect with all life.

Finding the moments of abundance

I’m often taken by surprise at how much life can change with a simple shift of perspective.

When we are viewing life from a sense of overwhelm, it’s so easy to fall into the malaise of seeing everything around as in terms of what is lacking. We’re more apt to think of life as pinched and mean, and, to act from fear or projections. We saw this in the UK during the first lockdown, with strange and unnecessary shortages of basic things: toilet roll, pasta, surface cleaners… People felt or feared, rather than experienced, that there was ‘not enough’. And the sense of lack became a self-fulfilling prophesy as people panicked and over-bought these commodities. A story of ‘not enough’ became an actual scarcity that never needed to be.

But the opposite can also be true. Marcus Aurelius advised that the first thing we should think about each day should be what a privilege it is to be alive. Like Epicurus, he’s suggesting that abundance isn’t about measurable quantities, but is a way of being.

This is something that should be on all our to-be lists because not only is abundance a way of living but it is also an act of hope and a blow against despair. It’s the inverse of living from fear and takes the focus away from the small ego-centred self to enable us to be more outward-looking. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why so many stories of generosity centre on people who don’t, in material terms, have a great deal and yet freely give.

The power of abundance

And it is also a witness to the extent to which abundance is as much a story as it is an objective fact; a powerful story that we can live by and change the world by, which is why, as writers, cultivating a life of abundance and generosity is vital. We write about the human condition in all its incarnations, not as judges, but as witnesses, and we do this most effectively when we show understanding and compassion.

Whatever genre we write in, poetry, fiction, essay … we write about flawed characters, because that’s the only sort of humans there are. Perfect characters and lives are not only dull and bland to read about, they are also a pernicious myth. There are no shiny perfect lives and images of such myths, whether touted by corporations enticing us to buy the ‘perfect’ lifestyle or by influencers whose own lives are not actually a montage of Instagram pictures, only takes us back to that sense of lack and discontent. Writing that deals in real human feelings, experiences and even mess, on the other hand, allows us to develop empathy and kindness; towards others and for ourselves. When we are not undermining ourselves, we are less likely to undermine others, and more likely to find abundance in the midst of the messiness of life.

You cannot lack compassion if you live from a wellspring of abundance, even for yourself. You cannot see the world from a jaundiced and cynical perspective if you are taking in delight in simple pleasures:

• the taste of a tangy physilis uncurled from its papery leaves;
• the sound of the river rushing under a bridge
• a child’s painting filled with exuberant colour
• the luxury of a hot shower after a long day

Nor can you race through life half awake if you are living from a sense of abundance. Instead, we slow down and savour simple pleasures, we pay attention. All of which makes our lives as writers and as humans so much the richer. And, moreover, it opens up the possibility of changing human relations and the future.

Writing abundance

And for writers, this includes how we deploy the abundant riches of language to express the power of living from abundance.

Words are our matter, Ursula Le Guin insisted in her last collection of essays. We shape reality with words. Writing is not only a cerebral process, it is at the heart of the rituals and myths through which we process whole swathes of life, physical, emotional, spiritual …

So not only do writers witness to the possibility of shaping life as a story of abundance, but we also participate in this abundance at its source, through the language we use.

When languages are lost, whole varieties of experience and nuances of feeling are lost with them. When words disappear, our abundance diminishes. The botanist and story-teller Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how the huge vocabulary for mosses is not just linguistic pyrotechnics or abstract and technical lists, but makes a real difference for how we interact with environments. Things that are lumped together in some catch-all lazy terminology are simply not seen, not protected, more likely to become endangered.

The words we use as writers are matter and do matter.

The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is

Susan Sontag says in the essay ‘The Conscience of Words’ in At the Same Time.

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

asserts Ursula Le Guin in The Wave in the Mind.

When a whole group of writers protested in 2015 at the Oxford Children’s Dictionary removing words like ‘starling’, ‘adder’, ‘bluebell’, ‘fern’ … in favour of entries like ‘cut and paste’ and ‘broadband’, they weren’t being crusty technophobes trying to foist their bucolic romaniticism on a changing world. Rather, they were making a serious point about how an impoverished language locks step with ecological degredation and a less abundant life.

And when Robert McFarlane followed up the protest with his book The Lost Words, exquisitely illustrated by Jackie Morris, it was as a rallying cry to the power and specificity of language, our clay as writers.

You hold in your hands a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find and speak. It deals in things that are missing and things that are hidden, in absences and in appearances. It is told in gold — the gold of the goldfinches that flit through its pages in charm — and it holds not poems but spells of many kinds that might just, by the old, strong magic of being spoken aloud, unfold dreams and songs, and summon lost words back into the mouth and the mind’s eye.

Words are vital, and as writers we need to revel in them. We need to reach for the freshest, most precise, most vulnerable and revealing words possible. An abundant language has the power to shift our myths and perspectives, as individuals and as societies. An abundant language is, as McFarlane says, strong magic.

Writing away from scarcity

If perfect characters are dull and weave the toxic illusion that life can be perfect; bland, scooped out language, often replete with cliché in lieu of deep thought and lucidity, poisons our view of the world, making it ever more shallow and narrow. Writing in the essay ‘Disaster Clichés: why we use them, why we shouldn’t’, Rowan Fortune points out that every cliché takes the place of,

a more authentic, more original, perhaps rawer, perhaps flawed, perhaps vulnerable response.

She goes on to acknowledge how we reach for clichés because they are a buffer, a way of managing difficult situations without making any deep emotional connection.

Far easier to employ one than to carefully work through someone else’s horror, all the more so if that horror mirrors one being repressed by the cliché’s wielder. But however easier, it is also a form of laziness that wounds us all.

Interestingly, while artists reach for an abundance of language, the limited palette of cliché is more likely to be employed by slogan makers and propagandists. Writers need to be those who resist this scarcity of language, whether it’s impoverished by clichés or streamlined dictionaries. When we pay attention to our hearts, to those in pain, to the world in crisis, it demands deeper, more nuanced, more painful responses from us. It demands writers who care, witness and prophesy; writers who drawn on an abundant language.

As in writing, so in life

Living from a sense of abundance is a choice that encourages us to take joy in a richer language and a slower, more deliberate life. But this doesn’t make the language and life of abundance one of skipping through meadows in a haze of permanent sunshine.

Making the perspective shift from scarcity to abundance is not a claim that we’re already living in utopia or should only write about fluffy bunnies finding an eternal source of carrots.

There’s a strong link between abundance and awe, which in turn leads us to the mysterious, the numinous and even to a sense of terror. A total eclipse is an extraordinary and powerful phenomena. It is awe-inspiring in the extreme, but it can also be deeply shaking.

And we won’t get to utopia without telling some truths about the current bankrupt systems of power and abuse that prevail on our planet.

Abundance isn’t a perspective for those who want to hide in La-la Land. Rather, it’s a mindset for those brave enough to find joy, hope and gratitude even in the midst of chaos, illness, loss, sorrow and mess. It’s the language of those with enough to vision to weave new stories even in desperate times.

Bringing abundance home

Ultimately, abundance is about how we inhabit and make sense of the world, how we are at home (or not) in ourselves and connected to all of life.

When we stop stressing about having more stuff or being on top or always having control; when we don’t distract ourselves with food, shopping, drink, over-work … or whatever our particular poison … then we stop living in scarcity. And when we make space to face ourselves with both honesty and kindness; give our writing time and power to play in the abundant stream of language; slow down and savour simple pleasures … we begin to live in abundance.

It’s never a final destination of course. Some days, the sense of scarcity comes flooding in. Some days the clay of our writing is clogged with clichés and refuses to be fashioned into anything fresh and true.

But we know abundance is all around us and we can gently begin again, and again.

In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf describes moments of epiphany as ‘shocks’ that jolt her out of the ‘cotton wool’ of her ordinary perspective and which she can only make sense of through writing:

… it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; … Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. […]

… behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. … we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

We are the words. And the words and life are abundant.

Kith for a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on the site as well as the opportunity to join this year’s writing community, Kith, We begin in March and the community includes 4 online workshops, a monthly prompt, a wonderful community space on Mighty Networks and a weekend online festival of writing with workshops, guest readers and the chance to read your work during the festival. While you’re on the site, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

Almost at the end of week 5 of the first lockdown (how long ago that seems!), life seemed to be a roller-coaster of emotions, shock and emotional fatigue, yet punctuated by extraordinary moments of connection, even of transcendence. Each morning our stranded-with-us house guest would sit on the slate wall outside, feeling the Spring sun and journalling. Some mornings I’d join him and, on one of those, a neighbour, talking from the breadth of the road that ran in front of our house, told me how his wife, an ambulance driver, had no protective clothing and had to buy her own face masks.

Anger came early with the pandemic. There was a lot of anger in the face of our lack of preparedness as a society. There was anger because we cared: about the dying and the grief-stricken, about those at much more risk than necessary while doing essential work; about the lack of testing or tracing; about all that planet-killing human behaviour that had led us from our former sense of what passed as ‘normal’ to this new situation.

A sense of calling

Our story on Earth needs to change. More and more of us know that. But most of us also feel overwhelmed at the enormity of the changes needed and unsure what part we can play or what effect we can have. And many of us are consumed by simply surviving. People have lost loved ones, faced sickness, seen jobs or businesses disappear, had their homes threatened. Others have managed to save businesses or freelance careers by working seven days a week. How do we change the world when we are besieged? How do we re-imagine our stories when we got to the end of 2020 exhausted, only to face new variants of Covid-19 and new rounds of restrictions and threats to livelihoods?

It can only begin with each of us. It starts with compassion, for ourselves, for our households, for whoever we have the power to touch or the privilege to connect with, for the bits of earth we have stewardship of. By self-compassion, I don’t mean fobbing yourself off with a new sweater or a big glass of wine. Compassion is radical, it is a sharing of suffering, it is sympathy so deep that it moves us to our guts. It requires attention: real focus, not a distracted nod in the right direction. Compassion listens.

I began 2020 with a question I wanted to ask of everything I do and am: Does it increase connection?

I can’t save the world. Not one of us can. But many of us together can make a difference and we do it wherever we deepen a connection (whether internally or by reaching out); whenever we show compassion; each time we pay attention and listen — to those suffering, to the earth, to our own bodies, to whatever is calling us.

Calling is not only a word that applies to those with a religious vocation. I don’t believe any of us has one essential pre-ordained purpose or destiny that we’re here to fulfil, but we do give our lives purpose by living with integrity, by constantly reappraising our values, by listening to what our guts and hearts, minds and souls are telling us.

Does it increase connection?

In the couple of years before the pandemic, I’d done a lot of thinking about the story I wanted to become. I’d managed to change how I worked and how I used time. It was a constant work in progress, of course, but there had been positive small steps along the way.

One of the things I’d been able to do in was to travel: slow travel, followed by spending time in one place for a period. I travelled with my husband, and each time we would muse about what it would be like to uproot and live in one of these places. We both loved Budapest, but we are not city people and it would be so far from family … and anyway, these wonderings were speculative — thought-experiments that we knew we wouldn’t act on.

Then Brexit shook us and opened up new questions and we began thinking more seriously about moving. Two places beckoned. We stayed in both in 2019. One of those places, a hamlet in a bit of surviving forest in Brittany, worked on us deeply. We felt a sense of calling that was both disturbing and exhilarating.

I’d lived on the edge of a mountain in Wales for nearly two decades, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. I’ve loved the place and the house, a quirky perpetual work in process full of wonderful spaces and family memories. Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with slate and with the rawness of the North Wales landscape.

What Brittany shares with North Wales, is a heritage of Celtic folklore and mythical narratives. Both have wild and beautiful coastlines and a language sprung from the same family-tree. So why move? It came back to that question: Does it increase connection?

We felt the UK was about to foreclose on many connections through the Brexit process and neither of us wanted to be part of that. But there were other, deeper threads emerging in this new story. I’d begun an apprenticeship in herbalism, and the wooded landscape, with its possibilities of foraging and space to grow a diverse range of herbs and food felt increasingly important.

Slow down, listen, connect

But above all else, there was that forest — it had spoken to us in powerful ways, ways that resonated with the values we wanted to live and embody:

Slow down, listen, connect — it is enough, the wind whispered through the trees during our month in Brittany.

It was the culmination of a year during which a new adventure had been suggesting itself more and more insistently. I love writing. I love working with writers. Mentoring, providing courses, engaging with a writing community, engaging with writers willing to dive deeply into their stories, gathering writers around my kitchen table, being able to walk alongside and support writers in their process and journeys … these things are a delight and privilege.

One word summing up these strands kept recurring: Kith.

As I’ve travelled; as I’ve worked with writers; as I’ve learnt from my herbal teachers and the peers learning with me, that word: Kith became a touchstone for a writing life that demands we slow down, listen, connect. Kith is a concept that stands against the myth of being ‘self-made’ or ‘self sufficient’. Instead, the notion of kith asserts that sufficiency must take us beyond the self. An abundant life is found by slowing down, paying deep attention and connecting, in a spirit of radical generosity. After all, true abundance is the art of knowing when there is enough.

Building an ark

So the vision for the move came from the urgency to find a place where we could embody some of this. It’s a vision of a place where we can forage and grow, make and create, where we can provide a space for writers, both a virtual and — when it is safe — around our kitchen table, at our hearth, around fires in the orchard besdie the river and beneath the stars.

I don’t know when those ‘in person’ meetings might be. But in the meantime, inspired by nature activist Mary Reynolds, I’m working with those in my household to make our patch of land (riverside meadow and a bit of ancient forest) into an ARK (Acts of Restorative Kindness); slowly making the house ready to be an Ark for writers, and developing an online space where we can shelter and connect.

2021 is going to be another challenging year, but it doesn’t have to be a year of overwhelm. Over this next year, I want to invite you to slow down, listen and connect, to join a writing community who are kith to one another and to all of life. We will begin together online and see where the journey leads.

Here’s to nurturing our stories of how we slow down, listen, connect.

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses here on the site as well as the opportunity to join this year’s writing community, Kith, While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

We are entering the season of Advent, a time of longing and anticipation; a time of looking back to what haunts us; a time to redefine and face the present moment. Advent, then, is a season for writers prepared to witness to what has gone before, mark out the territory of new possibilities and call us to centre in what we face now.

Writing the haunting

Parts of the past, our communal and individual pasts, haunt us. There are acts of betrayal or injury that reverberate down years so that we long to be free of them, yet they cling, ghost-like and amorphous, but powerful.

Letting go and forgiving can never be either commanded or faked. They are fragile and intimate processes, whether for people or ecologies. To move on from whatever haunts us, whether it is a broken relationship or genocide, is rarely a one-off action, but a process of witnessing, owning, briging to light and duly remembering on the way to finding a resting place. All ghost stories involve the spirit finding its way home.

The things that haunt us need facing and naming. Moreover, they need to be heard and learnt from so that the same behaviours that caused them are not endlessly repeated.

Looking to the past should not be a maudlin exercise in jinogism or nostalgia or stoking feelings of revenge. Rather, the things that haunt us should tell us what to long for in the future and how to live in the present. How not to repeat the mistakes, even as we acknowledge that we’re fallible and this will be a constant process.

Writing the longing

We long for so much. Advent is inextricably linked with notions of Christmas that have become synonymous with over-spending, over-eating, over-imbibing … Yet so often the scrabble to buy more, eat more, drink more, have more, hides much deeper longings: for wholeness, for integration, for meaning and connection.

The cravings for more and more stuff often hide the craving for life to be other than it is, less busy, less driven, less packed with things that fail to satisfy. The cravings can hide a deep existential unease that has particular incarnations in the time in which we live. As Olivia Laing remarks in The Lonely City:

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings — depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage — are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice …

We live in a time of longing for connection. We live in a time when more and more of us are unconvinced by the notion that things are as they have to be and that there is no alternative (TINA). Yet we remain surrounded by the rhetoric of individualism, and the delusional myth that we should be ‘self-made’. No wonder so many of us have lost all sense of our deeply grounded embodiment, let alone of our wider connection to all of life. Laing goes on:

… current studies suggest that more than a quarter of American adults suffers from loneliness, independent of race, education and ethnicity, while 45 per cent of British adults report feeling lonely either often or sometimes. … The lonely ones, a hundred million strong…

But there are alternatives. Whatever insights a period of lockdown and the restrictions of the coming winter have left, they that have at least given us the space to imagine and even experience elements of such alternatives. However hard corporate greed and international capitalism pushes for business as usual, we know that it is not ‘business in the only way possible’.

And artists and writers are those who can take new experiences and suggest new futures. We are those who can propose futures of connection, justice and ecological sustainability.

Longing can be wistful and stuck. It can trap us in wishful thinking that goes nowhere. Or it can be the beginning of change. When we long for something different we inherently recognise that something needs letting go, that something is not right. Longing can be the germ of transformation and healing.

Traditionally, Advent has more than a small element of darkness running through it; notions of the last things, the end times. But mixed with warnings of death, judgment, heaven and hell, there is also a longing for a new order. The end can be disaster or it can be the inauguration of a different kind of eschatology: a utopian heaven on earth. It can be hell, or it can be justice and peace.

But the other aspect of Advent is the longing for salvation: peace on earth, good will to all (hopefully to all life and not only to humankind). This longing begins deep within and puts out vulnerable shoots, but even tiny green shoots can crack open a concrete floor.

Which elements of Advent will we imagine, conjure and write about?

How do we see them taking shape?

Writing the moment

The ‘eschaton’ is the last day, the last thing, the last word. We’re not there yet but we’re pushing towards it in an unsustainable world choking on plastics and increasingly depleted of resources. But there is also another theory of eschatology that locates it not at the end of times but now. Realised eschatology is a theological notion that heaven is already here in new ways of living and relating and new processes of becoming.

This doesn’t have to be a narrowly religious conception. Writers of all faiths and none offer us visions of reality that are inclusive and sustainable, equitable and connected. And lives lived differently, even in the smallest of ways, can contribute to this moment of transformation.

Advent is a good time for some deep thinking. This Advent:

What are you haunted by that needs to be witnessed to so that you can move on?

What are you longing for and are any of these longings a covering for deeper existential longings?

What is your vision of a world transformed?

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

To live from a sense of abundance rather than lack, is to be rich.

The discernment to know what is unnecessary in life, what is merely superfluous, what is more than enough, is crucial to claiming the time and space to create. As Wendell Berry puts it:

Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.

At a book launch earlier this year one of the audience members asked me about having a sense of confidence in achieving an sales for the books I write. It’s wonderful when the work I’ve done connects with others. To make even the smallest difference to any life is humbling and wonderful, but the really amazing thing is to be able to do the work at all.

Being in flow, experiencing the writing process, learning who I am and who I am becoming, are so much more important than numbers of book sales or reviews. It’s not that I want my books to go unread, of course. But book sales are the bonus, not the motivation. It’s so easy to get caught up in the product and the applause as the priority, as though this will make us happy or demonstrate that we are better or more successful people.

When we feel that life is about what we lack. When we’re chasing success and external approbation then nothing will ever satisfy. We never reach the point of anything being enough or good in itself. As Stefan Zweig puts it:

History relates no instance in which a conqueror has been surfeited with conquests.

When we work for the end product, there’s always another and another bigger, better product to go after.

Conversely, when the motivation is the writing itself. When we do it for the process and because we love it. When we work on our internal story, then we become more joyful about the writing and, in turn, the work benefits.

When the moment is enough

When we write, create or live from a sense that we need to always be doing more, then we become insatiable. Even if we achieve what we set out to do, it’s not enough. There will be some bigger, shinier goal to persue. When we live from scarcity and lack, the present is always lacking, always being compared to some mythical future that constantly moves a bit further and further and further into the future.

But when we simply stay with the moment, get into the flow of that moment, centre ourselves around a still point, then the hunger for more and more, drops away in the stillness of the moment and the process.

We live in a culture that believes the motivation for work is predicated on worrying that we’ll fall behind, have less status, fewer conusmer goods, less prestige. But the desire to have more stuff and/or more fame is actually a very poor motivator. It keeps us stressed and in the shallows. People who are not alienated from themselves and others don’t need insecurity and envy as spurs to creativity.

Deep work comes from a sense of abundance and centredness. Deep work comes from slowing down and paying attention. Deep work happens when this moment is enough and we lose ourselves in it.

And enough isn’t about external products, what we have in the bank, how many friends or followers we have on social media or how many books we sell. Enough is an internal state of being. It’s about choosing your creative work and loving it. It’s about living from an attitude of connection, generosity and attention. As Lao Tzu puts it:

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

This questions our understanding of success. The dominant story of our time is that success is more, more, more. But is it?

When it’s the journey not the destination

Life doesn’t go in straight lines. We meet obstacles, have to double back to attend to baggage, need to improvise on the spot. As Mary Catherine Bateson writes in Composing a Life:

The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail.

We write new stories and become new stories in all kinds of messy ways. A good life is not one in which we make the most money and consume as much of the world’s resources as humanly possible, but one in which we create meaning and relationship. The knight errant, a Quixote figure looking for connection and determined to helpnalong the way, is all about the moment and the flow.

Likewise our creativity. The more we flow with it, improvising along the way, the more the process will be a delight and the destination will be secondary.

Bateson goes on:

Our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labour to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.

When success is an internal voice

The world is full of definitions of success. It’s possible to be brilliant and rich and feel empty. It’s possible to completely fulfill someone else’s vision of a life of achievement and feel alienated. It’s possible to live by laudable values but realise that you are simply conforming and ticking behaviours off a list with no sense of embodying the ideals.

The writer Parker Palmer instead suggests:

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Palmer is not suggesting fatalism, but stripping away all the conditioning and baggage that tells us who to be in order to dive deeply into that still voice within. Palmer goes on:

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about […] or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

The internal voice is the one that isn’t following those norms and cultural myths that shout at us about what we ‘should’ to do to make it big. Instead, the internal voice speaks:

the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live — but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

This voice may not always be comfortable:

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for “wholeness” is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

[…] The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.

When the calling is enough

When we listen to the wild animal of the ‘soul’ — resilient, savvy and shy, then we realise there is nothing lacking and we have the courage to set out as Quixotic knights errant to delight in the process — of life, writing, creativity …

It won’t make the path straight or smooth. It may bring neither riches not fame. But it will be a life of abundance, which is its own riches. It will be a life that is a different story.

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

You can be anyone, but you can’t be everything. You can make choices, but you can’t do it all.

‘Everything’ is one of the most insidious myths of our time. Doing it all and having it all dangled before us at every turn. Adverts are rife on every social media platform, on TV and as spam emails. Branding potentially covers everything from underwear to the food we eat. In Western societies it’s estimated we see from 4,000 to 10,000 adverts or brand labels each day, particularly if we spend time online, watching TV or buy any pre-packaged food.

And if this doesn’t make us want to drown our life in stuff or eat our way through a mountain of junk food, there are always social media influencers whose apparently perfect lives tell us that who we are is pitiful in comparison. In this arena, comparison really is odious.

Consumerism is based on lack. You can never have enough, do enough, be enough. It goes hand in hand with living at a frenetic pace in order to get, do and be more. And it wipes out simple joys and pleasures as we become ever more exhausted and disillusioned.

None of this is conducive to a creative life. Instead, we have to learn the art of saying no. The art of paring back, not on deep pleasure, but on shallow froth. The art of choosing what nurtures.

The superfluous

‘What needs less?’ is a key question of change. To transform life so that it is more connected, more deeply abundant, more full of creativity, we need to make choices and those choices often involve letting go of what is superfluous, what isn’t nurturing our creative soul.

These are not the fake and superficial choices between brands and distractions, but the choices to do the deep work that requires letting go of all that prevents us being a different story.

On the surface we may need to let go of distractions. But deeper down we will have to let go of all kinds of limiting assumptions and delusions. As Wendell Berry puts it in The Hidden Wound:

As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable.

The indispensible

Writing about the farm labourers he grew up with as the child of farm-owners, Berry remembers a man (Nick) with a particular ability to maintain a life rich in pleasure in the midst of hardship. Berry doesn’t romanticise poverty and there is certainly a complex and unjust history of class and privelege based on race behind Nick’s story. But, recognising that his perspective is subjective and based on childhood memory, Berry writes about how Nick became one of his teachers and:

ancestors you could say, the forebears of certain essential strains in my thinking.

He also acknowledges that the facts of Nick’s life were harsh:

And yet within the confines of those acknowledged facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not large pleasures, they cost little or nothing, often they could not be anticipated,and yet they surrounded him; they were possible at almost any time, or at odd times, or at off times. They were pleasures to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all. There were the elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm again after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot. […] And… Nick knew how to use his mind for pleasure; he remembered and thought and pondered and imagined. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the customs of necessity.

To take pleasure in using the mind, Berry reflects, is

the very antithesis of the thing that is breaking us in pieces.

The customs of necessity

Berry is right not to romaniticise the poverty or hardships of Nick’s life. Mastering the customs of necessity and taking pleasure in the daily rituals of a life well-lived and a life of thought, are no mean feats in any life and to do it in the face of a harsh existence is inspirational. But that can never justify oppression.

What Berry learnt was not that it’s okay to exploit people because they can still find ways to be happy, but rather a deep perspective on how much control a resilient and humane person can take in the most unlikely of circumstances.

As the pandemic goes on and we hear more about a second wave, many of us may be feeling overwhelmed and hemmed in by the ‘facts’. And yet most of us will have many more choices than Nick and can exercise even more choices by discerning what is superfluous and what is indispensible in our own lives.

[…] This much is clear to me: insofar as I am capable of feeling such pleasures […] I am strong; insofar as I am dependent on the pleasures made available by my salary and the things I own, I am weak. I feel much more secure in those pleasures for which I am dependent on the world, as Nick was for most of his, than in those for which I am dependent on the government or on a power company or on the manufacturers of appliances. […]

As writers, we don’t have time for the superfluous. This is not to say we have no time for fun and play, for family and love, for taking time to deeply relax. These are not superfluities.

But for competing with someone else’s salary or lifestyle? For amassing more stuff than we can ever use? For giving our creative time to mindless internet browsing or social media? Not so much.

What needs less?

The last word to Wendell Berry:

Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.

In The-World Ending Fire, essayist and poet, Wendell Berry raises a rallying cry against compromising with myths that are destroying the earth.

We are destroying our … land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. … We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. … There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace.

Not repeating the patterns

We’re approaching the The Celtic festival of Samhain, which has come to us as Halloween or All Hallows e’en. Traditionally, it marks the end of summer and autumn. It’s the beginning of a time of darkness when seeds become roots and new life is germinating. It’s a time for thinking of those who have gone before us, for thinking about loss.

This year has been one in which perhaps more of us across the globe have faced our finitude all at one time than for previous decades. It’s been a year when Whitman’s lyrical phrasing of how intimately connected we all are has been brought home by a tiny, invisible virus that forced us to try to maintain often impossible boundaries:

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

In this chain of connection, we’ve been bequeathed patterns of how we do things, how we live, the stories that shape our cultures and days. Some of these are vital and life giving, the blessing of ancestors. Some are death dealing, either because they grew in toxicity or because the world has shifted in ways that demand new stories.

One day we will be those ancestors and we want to leave two things:

stories that go on helping, nurturing and connecting

stories that can be changed when they no longer serve

We don’t have to repeat stories that are no longer life-giving.

Throwing off the decaying myths

At any given point in history we live in myths. At their best, these help us to navigate our world with powerful archetypes and metaphors in order to give meaning to ethical and social relations. But what when the myths no longer serve us? What when the myths have been corrupted?

Story is powerful and that power can be used for evil and terror as well as for healing and good. We see that, for example, when we look at stories of ethnic superiority under Nazi rule in Germany. We see it when we look at stories of so-called beauty or femininity that have supported practices like foot binding or genital mutilation.

But it’s so much easier to see how corrupt, harmful and toxic the framing myths of other times or cultures are. It’s much harder to get a clear perspective of the myths we live in; myths that might be just as pernicious. It’s harder because we are enmeshed in them. This, sadly, makes it easier for governments and big corporations to peddle myths with the underlying message that ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA).

The psychologist D Stephenson Bond uses a powerful image of myth as a whale whose belly we live within, like Jonah. Eventually, the whale dies and its body is washed onto the shore where it begins to rot. Some people get out and see the whale for what it is — not the world, but a carcass to move on from. Others cling inside, determined that this is the limit of reality.

During the lockdown in the UK, I had a friend who was worried about being thought insane, because the pandemic totally transformed his outlook. He felt his family was clinging inside that carcass while he saw a different world outside. He also felt increasingly uneasy when people talked about ‘getting back to normal’ because, for him, it was a myth that the world we were living in before the pandemic was ‘normal’, a world in which we decried, yet often saw no alternatives to:

• Polar ice caps melting
• Forests burning across the Amazon
• Fires destroying great swathes of Australia
• Child and slave labour supporting the global demand for goods from phones to chocolate bars, from cheap clothes to plastic toys
• Roads being built across deserts to mine rare earths
• The destruction of the ozone layer
• The mantra that we can consume more and more and more without limit

Wendell Berry, like my friend, is someone who sees the myths we are living in with clarity, but he doesn’t despair. He writes, he protests (non-violently), he deploys a language of alternatives and suggests ways of living … He also knows that change begins with each of us, particularly when we learn to respect ourselves and our dwelling places.

We can’t do it all. We don’t have to do it all. We do what we can, refusing to believe that ‘there is no alternative’ and being brave enough to ask ourselves what myths we feel we are living within currently and how they are they impacting us.

Being utopian

I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household

says Wendell Berry in his essay ‘Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience’.

The focus on the household has been particularly sharp this year. Some families, not used to being in each other’s company all day every day, felt enormous strain during lockdown and relationships were under pressure. For some, it was not simply mounting pressure but a different scale of volatility, with domestic abuse rising. Many, though, were households of one, some at ease with the solitude and others feeling increasingly lonely.

Whatever our particular household looked like, the need for kindness and patience, to ourselves as well as to whoever we may be sharing space with, was high.

Berry goes on to talk about how a competent morality balances between the doorstep and the planet.

No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly as dependent on the earth as the earthworms. To cease to know this, and to fail to act upon the knowledge, is to begin to die the death of a broken machine. In default of [hu]man[ity’s] personal cherishing and car, the earth must now become the victim of [her/]his institutions … And so, conversely, the most meaningful dependence of the earth is not on the […] government, but on my household — how I live, how I raise my children, how I care for the land entrusted to me.

In a situation of large scale ecological degradation or of global pandemic, it’s easy to understand why we look to mass solutions and big logistics. Clearly it matters that huge interests like governments and corporations take action. And as individuals or small groups we can feel ineffectual and overwhelmed. Berry admits that it can be enormously and at points impossibly difficult to maintain our integrity in the face of oppression, wars, racism and destruction.

And yet, once we think we are helpless, that nothing we think or do matters; once we submit to overwhelm or despair, then the forces of destruction have won.

Berry’s insight is a tiny but wonderful crack of light that uproots the perspective of overwhelm and despair. It asserts that each of us matters in our global as well as immediate relationships, and we do so by nurturing those closest relationships and the tiny bit of earth we can do something about, whether that’s several acres of forest or a window plant. Berry goes on:

Those two poles of life and thought offer points of view, perspectives that are opposite and complementary. But morally, because one is contained within the other and the two are interdependent, they propose the same consciousness and the same labor.

Holding on to visions of utopia might feel futile at the moment, but the world is hungry for new stories. Changing our myths is powerful. Writing about reclaiming paradise in an age of climate destruction, my son, Rowan, noted:

For me, however, the best fiction does not tell us what is before our eyes, it excavates, scours, reveals. […] Even if the Mephistophelesian pact of modernity is our extinction, utopias insist that there was a chance at shared liberation, of collectively getting it right. It demands we project our values outward, realise them as something to be shared. […] utopia asks us to imagine the recreation of society as a whole and ourselves only within that context. […] …utopia is hope projected outwards.

This is Berry’s global pole. We need those big stories coming from the local, the domestic, from each of us. The United Nations holds that there are four key qualities that are needed in times of crisis: kindness, generosity, empathy, and solidarity. If our relationship to our home and to our world rests on those, then we begin to write the stories of utopia that all of us can live by.

All of us need to dive deeply and ask

• What do we hope for the world?
• What do we hope for those you love? For family, friends, our household?
• What do we hope for ourselves?

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

We are kith with all life.

Our connections are to all — everywhere and always what defines life is relationship. Mindfulness may slow us down, make us more aware, but it is our bodifulness that often goes unsung and under-nurtured. To relate, fully and with attention, demands all our senses.

Attending to the networks of life

Writing in The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell notes:

…human lives and tree lives are made always from relationship. For many trees it is non-human species … that are the primary constituents of the network. Olive and bonsai trees bring humans to the centre, giving us direct experience of the importance of sustained connection.

Should those connections break, life is diminished, sometimes ended. […]

This inner nature is animist: rocks have desires, trees are imbued with Buddha-like solemnity. … The garden is not an escape into domineering control of nature; rather it requires sustained attention to the networks of life … to the inner nature of the nonhuman combined with close listening to accumulated knowledge off many human generations.

Such attention is bodiful. It not only demands deep listening but physical engagement with the world. And in this engagement we become unselfed, a concept developed by Iris Murdoch to describe those moments when we are so enraptured by something in nature, a kestrel, a star-scape… so that we forget ourselves, leaving behind ‘selfish care’.

Haskell quotes a bonsai gardener talking about how, over years, the work will:

decenter a person, drawing the locus of attention away from the self. ‘It’s less about me, much more about the tree and the work of people who came before. This effects the rest of my life. I’m more tolerant, understanding.’

In short, relationship changes us, and we realise afresh that separating any part of life from any other is impossible.

with all the senses

Studying an urban pear tree in Manhattan, Haskell charts this interconnectedness in how what we call one sense is actually a multiplicity of bodiful senses coming together, so that hearing is not only aural but pressure and electric charge, the vibrations of the skull:

Hearing is modulated by tongue taste, emotion, foot soles, hairs on skin. What we perceive is our body conversing with a purring, stridulating world.

He goes on to look at why street vendors in noisy cities sell food that is highly spiced and salty because we physically cannot taste subtlety amidst noise. Similarly, skin also makes a difference to hearing. In wind we mishear certain sounds, while:

Interior senses — emotion, thought, judgement — weave themselves into what seem to be exterior stimuli. Pitch and genre of music change our perception of food and wine, with bitterness emerging on our tongues from the lower registers …

Scent too is not a discrete sense, with microbes less abundant on city trees where the scent is overpowered by diesel fumes and bees bewildered and less able to find flowers and electromagnetic signals disrupting birds’ sense of direction…

We are a network of relationships, internal and beyond the body and into environment. We are a network of senses constantly communicating and affecting each other and being affected by what seems to be outside ourselves. All life is permeable, related, connected.

This has implications for how we write and for how we live. Talking of trees, Haskell says:

The future, the unfolding telos, is not contained in any self, in a tree seed or human mind, but has its origins and substance in living strands of relationship … A tree is the common life, a being that is multiplicity of conversation.

The same can be said of us. And every sense works together in that conversation. Writers are amongst those who go about the world with all their senses open and know how those senses meld with context and with one another to give us a deeper perspective on how we embody our writing to honour this reality of connection. We bring not only our whole selves but our environments to our writing. Who we are, what we see and hear, taste, scent and touch, and how these things are modulated by where we write, all cohere. Writers have lives with windows onto a multiplicity of conversation.

As I noted recently when writing about why writers need to embody what they write:

Disembodied, disconnected life is not a higher state of being, it’s fragmentation, illusion, grief and loss. We are kin and kith with all lives and artists of all kinds, and writers certainly, do well to embody that. If we don’t tell the stories of muscle, gut, the matrix of all life, of Matter herself, we will accelerate the time when there will be no story to tell.

Haskell’s study of trees across the globe only makes this more urgent.

in the context of community

And nowhere is this more sharply focussed than in the rainforest of the Yusuni Biosphere Reserve of western Ecuador. In this environment of almost science-fiction like diversity and extremity, where

The forest presses its mouth to every creature and exhales

with breath that is

hot, odorous, almost mammalian

where nothing keeps water at bay and sounds are constant, loud and of every kind of

whine, murmur, howl, yelp, whistle, squeal …

where to reach out while slipping on mud will result in either flesh grated or speared by the heavily armoured vegetation or invite a snake or ant to strike so that

nature seems to be one of vigorous, even frightening conflict

Even the name of things in Waorani is not of individual species but of their relationships. The Waorani have no hermits or rugged individuals, but

live like one.

This is not to say that skill and individuality are trampled or devalued but that such things make sense only in community. Anyone who wants to live in ‘self-reliance’ in such a society is viewed as ill, disturbed and not likely to survive. Individuals’ names relate to the group to such an extent that the name changes if someone leaves for another group.

And it is not only humans who use relationship as the basis of identity and survival in this forest, but also the trees, including the iconic ceibo tree, which hosts successive communities within and around itself, communities with which there are a myriad beneficial and complex relationships.

The forest is not a collection of entities joined by networks; rather, it is a place entirely made from strands of relationship. And for the people who live there, the forest is not

an assemblage of biological ‘others’.

The forest, including human life, is a unity of spirits, dreams and reality. This is not a unity made of forming parts together, rather

we exist from the start in spiritual relationship

Those of us raised in places where corporatism and individualism hold sway, are not from cultures at ease with living as one. We are more likely to cling to our individuality not as it relates but as it sets us apart. Yet in those transcendent moments when we lose ourselves in nature and are unselfed, we know in our gut that attending to the networks of life with all our senses is the only way forward.

The multiplicity of living like one

What this will mean is not simplistic or homogenous. It doesn’t demand that every society should have no notion of solitude as healthy and nurturing, for example. After all, the particular Waorani expression of living like one grows out of their particular geography and context. A forest in Brittany or a city in Italy will suggest other expressions of how we might ‘live like one’.

But the world certainly needs a new story and one that recognises that we exist from birth in a matrix of relationships and that our tight boundaries of self and other are illusory. After all, reconginising that we are kith with all life, might give rise to the multiplicty of stories of a future that is hopeful, embodied and connected.

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

To see beyond the self, to see the journeys others are making, without judgement, requires what Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, calls ‘unselfing’.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

Unselfing as transcendence

What she is talking about is a change of consciousness, a deep and radical perspective shift that often comes from an encounter with nature or a thing of beauty.

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

Art, beauty, nature, powerful stories, all of these transform the self by enabling us to forget ourselves, to lose ourselves for a while. In the face of an exquisite night sky, an extraordinary painting, a newborn baby, a stunning sunset, the self and the vision dissolve into each other. As Tolstoy puts it:

… a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

Faced with great beauty or with new life or the enormity of the universe, we sometimes manage to transcend the self. Murdoch goes on:

This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

Unselfing as the dissolution of dualisms

Holding on to notions of the self that harden the divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is enshrined in so many dogmas, both religious and secular. But in The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell observes:

We must ask the question: can we find an ethic of full earthly belonging? […] The answer depends, at least in part, on the kind of Earth to which we think we belong.

He goes on to say that is we see the world as only a set of physical laws then ethical nihilism is not difficult to reach:

If we’re a species made merely of atoms like all other species, no more and no less, it is a puzzle why we should believe that human caused climate change … is an ethical calamity but regard the changing climate of the Eocene redwood forests as an ethically neutral phenomenon.

And he asks whether our feelings about values, rights, the preservation of ecosystems are merely ‘neural tangles’ or have real meaning. Are ethical beliefs any more than ‘self-deluding dreams’? Haskell comes down on the side of meaning, though not in any simplistic sense:

I seek something less fractured, an ethic that is fully biological yet does not walk us into [a] cold universe, empty except for self-constructed miasma.

He finds what he seeks wherever we take tentative steps to listen, to all that is life; wherever we pay attention:

… a sensory, intellectual and bodily opening the the place. […] From this engagement … comes a more mature ability to understand what is deeply beautiful in the world … the ability to perceive beauty through sustained, embodied relationship with a particular part of the community of life. […] If some form of objective moral truth about life’s ecology exists and transcends our nervous chatter, it is located within the relationships that constitute the network of life. We are awakened participants within the processes of the network …

It is, Haskell says, an ‘ethic of belonging’. It is an ethic that extends Murdoch’s transcendent sense of beauty with an embodied experience of paying deep attention

We ‘unself’ into birds, trees, parasitic worms and, sooner or later, soil; beyond species and individuals, we open to the community from which we are made. […] Someone who has listened to a prairie, a city or a forest for decades can tell when the place loses its coherence, its rhythms. … Unselfing through repeated lived experience is necessary because many biological truths reside only in relationships beyond the self.

Ethics, for Haskell, are not human-made, but intrinsic:

A mass extinction is a bad thing, in and of itself. […] No doubt what a raven, a bacterium or a ponderosa pine sense in their worlds is radically different from what I perceive … But such differences are not necessarily barriers to aesthetic and ethical judgement. Beauty is a property of networked relationships that might be heard through ears of peculiar and multifarious design.

Unselfing as a new perspective on time

Such attention to and encounters with all life, Oliver Sacks observed, also give us a different sense of time, as though we suddenly see not through the lens of the daily round of what seems urgent, but with a longer sense of time:

… it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or eons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes.

Such detachment from ‘urgent time’ brings a sense of serenity. It comes, Murdoch notes, not from efforts of will, but from relaxing into the flow of all life:

A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced. More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.

Unselfing as continual process

Murdoch notes that while we attempt to ‘pierce the veil of selfish consciousness’, nonetheless:

It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

We are flawed. The ego and the shadow reassert themselves. But sometimes, just sometimes, we experience these extraordinary moments of transcendence. Sometimes we forget ourselves long enough to dissolve the dualisms that keep life fragmented and erect false boundaries of ‘them’ and ‘us’, of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Sometimes we forget ourselves long enough to become part of a different scale of time, seeing life through a different lens.

We never finish the attempt, but each small transformation breaks open a new story of how humanity, of how all life, can go forward in hope. And as writers, we can tell those new stories of transcendence, the connection of all life and vast time in which every speck of life has value.

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

Being an artist or writer is emotionally, spiritually and intellectually demanding. If we are working with a sense of vision and integrity it is all the more so. But what when we are working not only without automatic fame and approval, but in difficult and extraordinary times?

The difficulty might be personal — chronic illness or bereavement or trying to care for a family and make ends meet. It might be political threat or living in a context where our race or gender is unwelcome. It might be the overwhelming sense of how far ecological degradation has gone and the struggle to witness to alternatives. And all of us are writing in uncertain times — in the midst of a global pandemic.

Whatever it is that is assaulting or swamping us, the ability to go on taking risks, making mistakes, and trying again is the essence of artistic integrity.

When the world is unravelling:

Make good art

In the book, Make Good Art, originally delivered as a speech to a class of graduating art students, the writer Neil Gaiman puts this succinctly and powerfully:

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. … Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

And of course, making good art involves not only learning and honing our craft (constantly) but also valuing your creativity with a passion that might seem a little crazy to those who aren’t artists or writers. To do this, we adopt some high risk strategies to protect our vision, strategies like:

• Giving our writing time and power even if it means we don’t do the laundry or turn down offers of something better paying.
• Writing primarily for the joy of it. As Ray Bradbury put it:

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work — which meant that life did not feel like work.

It entails making mistakes, over and over, but getting up from them and doing it all again. To quote Neil Gaiman again:

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.

Unlearn what you think you know in order to truly live

When the world is unravelling, we have to remember that the vocation to make art, whether visual, audible or in writing, is first and foremost about what it means to live. And we witness and connect most powerfully when we begin from self-compassion.

Sherwood Anderson’s advice to his son was that:

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Making good art, even as the world unravels, demands that we make an extraordinary personal journey. The poet E E Cummings points out that it’s not lack of fame and approval that is the hardest thing for the artist, but her or his own internal struggle to find an authentic voice which involves overturning every pre-conceived idea.

The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.

He goes on:

Look into yourself … Art is not something which … you are not or which you are. If a thorough search of yourself fails to reveal the presence of this something, you may be perfectly sure that no amount of striving, academic or otherwise, can bring it into your life. But if you are this something — then, gentle reader, no amount of discrimination and misapprehension can possibly prevent you from becoming an Artist. … You will know that when all’s said and done (and the very biggest Butter Baron has bought the very last and least Velasquez) “to become an Artist” means nothing: whereas to become alive, or one’s self, means everything.

In other words. it’s not only the story we write, but the story of who we are that is transformed by diving deeply into our art and how we embody and live it. As Sherwood Anderson went on in his advice to his son:

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live.

And this act of being alive is soul-saving, for ourselves, and for whoever we touch with our writing.

Pause and then …

Making good art, diving deeply into our writing, transforming our story by the work we do, takes us out of the dazed state that life can sometimes put us in, especially when there seem to be bombs going off constantly.

My family has a word for all the stuff that drains us to such a point that we stop wanting to create — ‘incoming’. Some days the press of political chaos, family or friends in pain, emergencies small and large (or seeming so), bits of the roof falling off, rude emails, plumbing disasters or just keeping the house and work going, becomes such a tidal wave of ‘incoming’. On those days simply being awake and alive enough to think creatively or write can feel like it’s too much.

Yet this is exactly the time when we most need the integrity to shift perspective, look fear in the face and refuse to obey it. We know that creating something requires a willingness to make changes, to let go of whatever is holding us back. We know it takes death for there to be a rebirth. Yet we keep fighting it.

I’m currently on the brink of a huge transition in how I work and live. I want it to happen. And yet I still persist in clinging to patterns that are not serving me but which are safe and comfortable. I try to kid myself that I can have this transformation and keep the old patterns. Why? Because change is scary.

We all feel fear. Sometimes it’s an important survival mechanism. So listening to our fear can be no bad thing. But we don’t always have to do what fear tells us to do. It’s a choice. And we can make that choice when life is throwing a lot of ‘incoming’ at us by refusing to become more and more frenetic and reactive, and instead taking time to pause.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a life that makes my idea of ‘incoming’ seem paltry. She had a rare condition that left her debilitated, weak, in pain and often bed-bound for long periods. For several years her contact with the outside world was only through letters. She lost brothers she loved and her possessive father disinherited her when she married the poet, Robert Browning. Yet she never dramatised her suffering, choosing instead to delight in her writing and in her life. As says in her epic poem, ‘Aurora Leigh’:

What is art, But life upon the larger scale, the higher,

When, graduating up in a spiral line

Of still expanding and ascending gyres,

It pushes toward the intense significance

Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?

Art’s life, — and where we live, we suffer and toil.

If all the demands and difficulties that life throws at us, and all of the world’s unravelling are not going to derail us from our art and life, then we have to pause, slow down, breathe deeply and make a choice. Hopefully, we will choose to make good art, to unlearn whatever patterns are holding us in fear. We will choose creative risks, integrity, life.

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.

Creative life is a privilege. Recently, I read a manifesto for the creative life that disgusted me. It oozed advantage and entitlement.

Life is simple? Not for those whose homes have burnt in bush fires due to ecological degradation. Not for single parents working two or three minimum wage jobs. Not for refugees. Not even for those who have secure homes and a decent income but who are also full-time carers or struggling with chronic illness. For many people, simply figuring out the logistics of day-to-day life is a massive creative project in itself.

Those of us who create full time or have lives that don’t suck the marrow out of us, enjoy immense privilege. And we therefore carry a responsibility to create with integrity.

Creation over production

In one of his many poignant letters to his brother, Van Gogh notes how overlooked an artist can be:

Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.

In such a climate, it’s so much easier to give in to the fads of ‘what’s in’ or to produce pulp that doesn’t make demands of the viewer or reader. The poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning were painfully aware of this. Whilst Elizabeth’s risk-taking and unconventional approach did find admiration, Robert’s poetry was either dismissed or ignored. But neither of them wrote for approval. And Elizabeth was appalled that:

That such a poet [as Tennyson] should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics… is much as if Babbage were to take my opinion and undo his calculating machine by it.

Creative vision is so easily diluted by the, often understandable, desire for plaudits and prestige. But once an artist or writer makes fame and/or money the goal, rather than something that may or may not happen, the more and more the paymasters will assume the right to tell the creator what to produce. Fame or income that comes along as a by-product is one thing, but courting it by producing to order takes away artistic control and the joy of creating.

Readers over critics

All artists need feedback. It’s good to push our boundaries and improve our craft. We write to communicate and to improve how we communicate involves being responsive to readers, being willing to take advice while honing our distinctive voices. We should hope to develop confidence in our writing rather than blind pride. And so we work with trusted readers or mentors to stretch ourselves. But this is very different than contorting what we write to fit the marketplace. And particularly when the market is likely to move on to the next fad before we’ve even finished trying to follow the last trend.

The eminently self-confident Walt Whitman wrote that:

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

after experiencing everything from bland dismissal to fierce hatred towards his publication of Leaves of Grass.

This didn’t mean he refused to listen to anyone. He also wrote:

Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?

Rather it meant that he knew when to hold to his own voice and integrity. He had no time for professional critics who existed only to take others apart. And he is joined by many artists and writers who don’t read professional critics, not from over-sensitivity or hubris, but because it’s such an easy route listening to ‘what is in’ to moulding your work to please. In her diary, Susan Sontag noted:

Reading criticism clogs conduits through which one gets new ideas: cultural cholesterol.

With integrity and vision

To remain risk-taking and true to an artistic and creative quest, to be humble enough to listen to good advice and confident enough to not deliberately court fame and approval, takes extraordinary integrity and vision. This is how the composer, Felix Mendelssohn put it:

When I have composed a piece just as it sprang from my heart, then I have done my duty towards it; and whether it brings hereafter fame, honor, decorations, or snuff-boxes, etc., is a matter of indifference to me.

He wrote this not as the famous person we now know, but during a time of anti-Semitism and a faddish popular taste. In his lifetime, he did not achieve fame and approval, but held to his creative integrity anyway, composing for pleasure and passion. Writing to Eduard Devrient, he says:

You reproach me with being two-and-twenty without having yet acquired fame. … I cannot help it, for I no more write to gain a name, than to obtain a Kapellmeister’s place. It would be a good thing if I could secure both. But so long as I do not actually starve, so long is it my duty to write only as I feel, and according to what is in my heart …

And he goes on to note an ironic fact about not trying to write to please:

I have hitherto found that the pieces I have composed with least reference to the public are precisely those which gave them the greatest satisfaction.

For the wild joy of being

Mendelssohn held to his vision and the voice of his heart, allowing for ‘success’ to be a by-product but not a goal of his art. Whitman held to his integrity when as a young poet, an unknown writer at a time when the going was hard because, as he later reflected, he had a vision that had nothing to do with fame, money or approval.

Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics?… I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict. […] The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.

When our writing arises from passion, from generosity, from connection with all life, it has its own pulse and spirit. When we create with this level of integrity, something deep and interior happens and all that is shallow falls away. Whatever we are creating takes on life of its own, a life that connects to all life.

Be a creator, not a producer

Create

• for readers, not critics
• with integrity and vision
• for the wild joy of whatever you are brining to life

Becoming a different story

Thank you for reading — if you’d like to join writers who are diving deeply into the writing life and making transformations, sign up to my email list. You’ll also find free courses on my site. While you’re there, take a look at my book Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life.