Where is your writing coming from? From studying the market and hoping to catch a trend before it’s gone? From emulating another? From listening to outside advice about what to say? Or from listening to your deepest knowing about the experience and wisdom you’ve been given to share?
I was just listening to Edward Mills’ interview with Adoley Oduntun on shifting from “making things happen” (“Law of Hard Work,” or even “Law of Attraction”) to allowing our authentic plan to emerge, “The Law of Emergence.” She said, “I believe that each of us has a divine blueprint that is already there, just as the caterpillar has within it the butterfly. . . . The perfect pattern is already there. The oak is inherent in the acorn. The butterfly is inherent in the caterpillar. Our job is to create the environment to allow this to emerge.”
[And yes, as founder of Blue Monarch Press, I gravitate to the butterfly themes emerging all over this year. May we all migrate together!]
My first semester of college, when panic expressed as writer’s block nearly took me down for the count, a professor suggested, “Writing should be organic—one sentence growing out of another, as naturally as a tree grows out of the ground.”
It didn’t help—at the time. And come to think of it, a tree isn’t exactly an overnight sensation. Turns out I was a tree writer, even a tree person. I needed more time, plenty of respiration, sunlight, and nourishment. You can’t rush an oak tree. You can’t hurry a cocoon. But you can provide the space, the protection, and the environment.
How do you create an environment to support your emergence? Are you protecting the space to be still, resting in darkness, to listen to what’s emerging in you?
Text © Gwyn Nichols 2010
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