Sacred Fire

Photo Credit: 

There are no legends, old or new, about the fire lily.
The fire lily does not come with a user's guide,
nor does it have a press agent.

Sometimes we must cope with things as we find them.

Copyright © 1997, 1998 by Diane Wilson. All rights reserved.

diane@firelily.com

After the long summer of reading and writing, I go back to my job as a lecturer at Bowling Green State University.  I suddenly have responsibilities and mounds of papers to grade.  It is easy during this intense time of work to let my creative energies wane.  I have recently been talking about this with my friend, Vicky, who is also undergoing a dearth of imagination.  To keep myself connected to storytelling, I buy and read books about myths.  Recently, I was reading David Leeming and Jake Page's book, Myths of the Female Divine.  There I found a story about a pre-Christian goddess named Bridget.  I looked Bridget up on the internet and found this article, referring to a goddess named Brigid, who appears to be the same goddess I came across in Leeming and Page's book.  Another site includes intriguing information about Brigid, including:  "when her beloved son was killed, Brigid invented keening, the mournful song of the bereaved Irishwoman; this story draws her close to the great mother goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean, and like them, Brigid was identified with the earth herself and with the soil's fertility."  There is also a beautiful painting of the goddess on this site.

Reading about gods and goddesses fills me with inspiration.  Gods and goddesses of old are close to me in nature, representing my dark and light aspects, also representing concepts that are hard to wrap my mind around.  Bridget is the goddess of wisdom and of the written word.  I find I need her as the semester moves past mid-point and responsibilities multiply.  I do not want to lose my center out of which I create.

According to Leeming and Page:

"Bridget was the powerful Moon Goddess of Wisdom, the creator of the written word.  In pre-Christian times, her priestesses kept a sacred fire burning in her honor.  By this tradition, she is tied to the Greek Hearth Goddess, Hestia, and her Roman counterpart, Vesta, with her vestal virgin followers.  When Christianity emerged as the dominant religion among the Celts, she was much too popular to be ignored, so she became Saint Bridget...

"Born at dawn one day long ago in a pillar of shining fire, she was the great teacher.  Priestesses at her shrine, the daughters of the flame, brought word to the women of the villages about using fire to forge iron, about writing, about using the water from her sacred springs and wells to heal the sick."

Bridget truly represents the healing power of words.  Just thinking about her lights a fire within me.  We can never forget the importance of sharing our words with others.

Moreover, thinking about Bridget keeps creativity burning within me.  

Vicky, and all who want to write, I hope this helps. 

Between Wanting and Needing

Image by Ron Huxley (?)

Between Wanting and Needing:  Where lies the difference?

I found this quote on an online game called Sage.  I thought the question an excellent representation of what I am continually trying to answer in my stories.

The poet Robert Bly said in a 2004 interview with The Sun that there is "this whiny one inside us who wants to be happy all the time."  Bly said, "In the Muslim tradition, that whiny one is called the nafs, which is the greedy soul ... the insatiable soul, the rapacious soul."

Bly then quotes from his own work:  "It's all right if I feel this same pain until I die.  It's all right if the boat I love never reaches shore."

What Bly is saying is that it's all right if we don't always get what we want.  Are our NEEDS being satisfied, that's the thing. 

As writers, we NEED to write.  As much as we might think we'd love the fame, money, and recognition that go along with publication, it really must be all right that we simply write.  As Bly said, "You can write a poem and not care if it's published or not."

Bly says that the greedy part of our soul wants to be comforted and praised all the time.  He says it's all right if this doesn't happen.  It's all right if we do something "beautiful and good" without "getting any candy" for it, Bly says. 

Michael Ventura, who interviewed Bly, responded to Bly's comment by pointing out that the disappointment "can open a space for something new."

As a writer I continually struggle with the greedy one who wants recognition for the hours I have spent alone, struggling with words. 

I must continue to write; and what or when or how I write cannot depend on recognition, praise, or reward.  Otherwise, I'm giving in to the nafs. 

Bly revealed:  "The Sufis say the nafs is part of our ancient animal-soul, which is determined to have food, power, and sexuality, and to stay alive, even to the detriment of those closest to us."

I submit that the nafs also is determined to stay alive, even to the detriment of our "self."  The nafs can destroy our garden.

What is the difference between what I WANT and what I NEED?  Such an important question, found, by chance, by clicking on an online game called Sage.

It is a question I will continue to explore in all my writing.

My Garden

 

 

Antonio Machado

The wind, one brilliant day

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted
to you?" 

I first ran across a reference to this haunting poem in The Sun Magazine (May 2004). The poet, Robert Bly quoted from the poem as a way of explaining why he writes.  Subsequently, I sought out the poem so I could read it and keep it in my thoughts.  Like Bly, I worry about my garden--are my flowers dying from lack of care? 

The garden is the symbol of the self, as is the rose.  Thus our creative life is of utmost importance to the cultivation of our garden.  If we don't tend to our creative life, our garden will die.

How would I answer the wind, if it came to me asking for the odor of my roses?

*In the same interview, Bly quotes Wallace Stevens, the poet:  "In excess continual, there is a cure for sorrow."

Nature, like our imagination, is prodigious!

The poet, Robert Bly
 

Organic Imagination

   

Photo Credit:  Ruven Afanador

MAY SARTON

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before--”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now so stand still to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place

From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

(I underlined the lines that connect the poem to the photograph for me.)

As soon as I saw this gorgeous photograph in The New Yorker (Oct. 11, 2004), I thought it looked like the organic imagination, the organic nature of writing, especially the kind of writing I do--the writing of self-discovery.  

(The photo is really of MaryJane Butters, an organic farmer.)

Even writing that is not "autobiographical" is self-discovery, I believe, because through my writing I'm trying to discover how I'm connected to others, and to something greater than myself.

Sarton's lines:  "My work, my love, my time, my face" /
"Gathered into one intense" / "Gesture of growing like a plant" are magnificent in the way they connect self to art.

 

Every Day I Remind Myself

**Thank you AOL Editors for this week choosing  "Theresa Williams--Author" as a top-five pick.

"Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving." - Albert Einstein

I found this quote on April's blog.  It reveals the way I feel about writing--that it is a way of staying connected to a positive force.  The only way to truly pass on the force to others is to WRITE. 

This recognition is important for me, because sometimes I feel "guilty" when I take time away from other obligations or pursuits in order to write.  I feel guilty for shutting myself inside a room and spending so much time away from my family.

Einstein's quote turns guilt on its head.

 

You Dream It As You Tell It

Photo of Tim O'Brien from the Jacket of his first book, If I Die In A Combat Zone

On October 20, I will hear Tim O'Brien speak at our university.  This semester, the incoming freshmen are participating in the Common Reading Experience (CRE) by reading O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried.  With America again again at war, his novel has a relevancy not missed by the young people in my classes.

 

Tim O'Brien as a young soldier in Vietnam

While rereading The Things They Carried, I've been stuck most of all by what O'Brien says about storytelling as an act of survival. 

For instance, at the end of the chapter, "Spin," O'Brien writes:  "Stories are for joining the past to the future.  Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.  Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." 

Stories not only join the past and future, O'Brien tells us, but they can also represent an opportunity to make right.  In his chapter, "On The Rainy River," he (through his narrator) reveals that the function of the story is to thank a man named Elroy Berdahl:  "this story represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue."  It is as though this gesture of gratitude is necessary to the survival of O'Brien's narrator, and by extension, O'Brien's own survival.

I believe the most powerful evocation of the purpose of stories, of their ability to help the teller "survive" occurs in the final pages of the novel when O'Brien writes, "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combineto make spirits in the head.  There is the illusion of aliveness." 

O'Brien tells us here that within our stories, the dead can live again through us--we can restore something of the past for ourselves and we can create a vision of the past for our readers.  Yet the primary function for O'Brien of his storytelling seems to be his narrator's (and his own) survival, for he writes:  "I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming [about the past]."  In these dreams, which become his stories, O'Brien recognizes that he'll "never die." 

Of particular note is the fact that the character, Norman Bowker, commits suicide after he returns home from Vietnam.  O'Brien suggests this act is partly due to his inability to tell his own story of what happened to him in the war.  In a letter, Bowker begs Tim to write Bowker's story:  "I'd write it myself except I can't ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can't figure out what exactly to say. ... You were there--you can tell it." 

O'Brien then reflects:  "I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't.  Yet when I received Norman Bowker's letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse.  By telling stories, you objectify your own experience.  You separate it from yourself.  You pin down certain truths.  You make up others.  You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, ... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

Tobias Wolff once wrote in his magnificent memoir, This Boy's Life, that the man can give no help to the boy.  Yet, using skating as a metaphor, O'Brien explains how telling his story now can give help to the child (Timmy) he once was and to the man (Tim) he will be in the future. 

He writes, "I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story." 

James W. Loewen writes in his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, that the purpose of the study of history is not simply to discover "what happened," but to restore to the past all its overlooked possibilities. 

Storytelling, as O'Brien shows us, can do the same thing.

Cost What It May

HELDER CAMARA

When Your Ship

When your ship, long moored in harbor
gives you the illusion of being a house,
put out to sea.

Save your boat’s journeying soul,
and your own pilgrim soul,
cost what it may.

There have only been a few times in my life when I have felt fearless, ready to "put out to sea" no matter the cost. 

Yet this is indeed the journey we must make, each time we set out to make art.

If I weren't such a coward, if I hadn't spent so much time sitting in my long-moored boat, how much further along would I be now?

To Die and So To Grow

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher love-making
Sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
And, finally, insane for the light,
You are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

I love this poem by Goethe for the way it speaks of the metaphorical death we should all welcome.  Growth is impossible without death.  This means not only the recognition of our own mortality but also the many "deaths" we experience as we pass through thresholds of experience.

Recently, I was discussing this concept with creative writing students; they seemed confused and then one young man raised his hand and said:  "I get it!  It's like that scene in Star Wars when Luke goes into the cave to face his deepest fears.  He slays Darth Vader, only to see his own face instead of Vader's when he looks behind the mask."

Falcon, Storm, or Great Song?

RAINER MARIA RILKE

I live my life

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

One of the ideas I frequently talk about in my creative writing classes is the necessity of being in tune with our "center."  I often find that beginning writers focus so much on being "original" that they reject outright the idea of being connected to any source other than their own "creativity."  Often these beginning writers seem to believe this "creativity" is housed only in the brain.

But I believe our "center" and our "creativity" is connected to something divine and when we access this divinity, we are in turn being connected to poets and storytellers of old. 

As a writer, I'm searching, just as Rilke searched, to know if I'm "a falcon, or a storm, or a great song."  

My Boat

 

 

JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing.....silence.....Waves.....
----Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

This is what writer's block can feel like.  It is a feeling of being stuck in the deep waters of your imagination.  The boat is your mode of navigating the imagination.  Your ability to create has struck up against some "great thing" (your memory or inability to remember, your idea or an idea that will not clarify itself, your understanding or lack of understanding, your need or your desire).

This poem helps me to see that getting stuck is not permanent and will possibly provide some new insight or opportunity.  We only have to be patient.

Addendum:  Adding to the notion of Writers Block, my friend "B" writes:  So, this should be the beginning of a list of all the various kinds of writing and to what degree, if any, I have Writers Block. I write every day, and have written nearly every day, all my life. I even have copies of two letters written when I was ten. So, for me to claim I have writer's block would be insane.

What I have is subject, writing subject block, and that could be a good thing.

So for me, the narrow question for me personally is when am I going to firm up my intention to write something, anything, that can be published. I have Publishing block, not writers block.

I really like this idea, and the idea of Publishing block has also been true for me, and for many others, I'm guessing.  Thanks for the reminder, "B."