How to Write in a Circle

I have been writing lately. Not a lot, and not especially directed.

I have been writing in short bursts, while waiting in doctor's offices and therapist's waiting rooms and restaurants. Writing in a red Moleskine journal with a pack of Stabilo markers. A rainbow of words: notes on the weather, on the spring flowers gently breaking the back of winter, the light at play under a scrim of clouds, a maple moon hanging sweet in the star-bright night. Snippets of overheard conversations. Measures of my own emotional climate, changeable as it is. Definitions, quotes, notes from books that are like these rivers feeding into me.

Most importantly, I have been writing in a Circle. I have been taking part in a writing group, Zee's Writing Circle. Writers, all women, gather in a circle of mismatched chairs and write on a particular prompt, or "Spark," for one hour. The "Spark" may be an object, a photograph, a quotation that helps a story emerge--memoir, poetry, fiction.

After that hour of intense writing, we eat a piece of chocolate (sweet reward!) and then we read aloud our stories. Listening to an annotated list of items purchased at the hardware store, we hear the story of a person's life and loves. We revisit a long-shuttered bookstore, imagine Tulip Queens and drunken firemen, hear the booming voices of shopkeepers and the sweet lisping voices of toddlers.

We write about ourselves and the people near and dear to us, both real and invented; visit places of memory or imagination, some paradises, others plagued by disaster or littered with disquieting portents of danger.

As I have been listening with deep attention to these amazing stories that emerge in one short hour during Circle, I am being nudged to accept something that a very wise person clarified for me:  

Writing is a sacred practice, involving reverence and devotion.
Writing is entering a sacred space.
Writing is slipping into sacred time: past, present, and future in one.

And believe me when I say that I don't use the word "sacred" lightly, or easily. I use the word in the sense of something essential to life and the conscious living of it, the "unnameable, indescribable source of life and consciousness that pervades every particle of reality." (Nancy J. Napier, Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.)

When I embrace writing as sacred practice, I discover through words a joyful mix of spirit and grace and love and laughter. As I write, I notice. I notice and am inexplicably moved by the gentle swaying of a linen banner caught in a breath of air; my Loki-boy catching a falling gold leaf on the palm of his hand. I find joy singing through me when I find the right words to put to the melody of objects. When I write, really write, I dive deep. I slip into some hidden pool within myself and access forgotten memories, making new connections as I weave a story from them. As I put myself in the head and heart of a character, I call on my reserves of empathy and compassion.  

It's not easy for me, this practice. I have to lift the barriers of inattention and distraction and exhaustion and depression and let myself practice this sacred act of writing--this sacrament of pen and paper or pixels and screen.

When I do so, I am alive, open to myself and the world and the everyday expression of the sacred.

(Whoa, my sacred time is up! Even Priestesses of the Word have to emerge every now and then from sacramental practice in the Temple of Type to shuttle a child to math tutoring, make a lemonade pick-me-up for another, and feed hungry children. :) )