Sometimes when a lot is happening—like in the last year—it seems impossible to say anything at all, hence the inbox silence from me over the last several months. Like many of us, I have felt wary of saying the wrong thing when there’s so much listening to do.
I have also felt something changing, both internally and externally, though I haven’t wanted to rush into this new terrain. Instead, I’ve been stirring into the changes, writing some then stepping back, giving the stories space.
The only thing I’ve come to know is that I want to write more personally, to share more specific, smaller insights and experiences beyond the main origin story I’ve shared about Sense Writing so far. And I feel that the earth has gotten quiet enough to hear, the ground soft enough.
The world has been building towards an understanding that we need to grow capacity for more narratives, ones that we knew but ignored, our own inside of us, and the ones outside.
And this is what Sense Writing has been about all along.
Growing the capacity to change
When the narratives that have shaped our understanding of ourselves and the world no longer hold or are in flux, it’s disorienting. We can react in the moment, with rage or sorrow or bewilderment, but these reflexive reactions can all too quickly dissipate before affecting real change (especially in our screen-saturated world).
When it comes to doing our own creative work, it can seem downright impossible to find the muse again.
In later blogs, I’ll talk about how building complexity and capacity—internally, gently, through foundational approaches—enables a more durable empathy than our first-line, knee jerk responses. I’ll also be writing about how this process involves changing fundamental ways that we experience and interact with the world, and not just crafting narratives in a new way.
Of course Sense Writing affects our writing practice and the stories we tell, but it also affects how we can imagine a meaningfully different world and how we can participate in it.
And we can’t do that without learning to be where we are now.
Re-imaging the future.
Moment-to-moment presence
I originally created this gift sequence for a Sense Writing fiction class I taught years ago, but I’ve modified it to help you be wherever you are now. It’s inspired by a visualization exercise created by Irene Fornes, a Cuban-American playwright who was a luminary of the downtown theater scene and mentor to generations of playwrights.
Though I never studied with her, I spent countless hours with her in the early 2000s, as the middle stages of her dementia were setting in. A friend of mine, Michelle, came in as her caretaker when others in the theater community just disappeared.
Dementia changes the narrative, throws it into flux. Yet we spent hours walking around the Village, eating, going on short adventures—each day a moment-to-moment creation in the presence of the zig-zagging, trickster muse that we can all become for ourselves.
“There are two of you- one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write better keep tricking the one who doesn't.”
- Irene Fornes
Here’s your invitation to welcome that muse. Find a spot to lie down for 25 minutes and press play.
Michelle, me, and Irene (L. to R.), photo by Madeleine George
