Writing & Living

What I learned from giving up effort. 

I learned something about writing and living today.

I had been walking around inside this idea that I had to write about an extensive collection of theological insights acquired over the course of ten years of pastoral teaching and seven years of graduate school in theology and ministry. But for some reason, today, I decided to lighten up and write about what I’d been thinking about, which had included, along with the laundry and the weeding and the paying of bills, a brief existential crisis.

I wrote two sentences. They were good sentences; I liked them. Then, a large STOP sign presented itself in the mind-body. It was really clear that nothing else was going to be forthcoming anytime soon.

I panicked.

Then, I decided not to fight it. I had noticed last week that the writing had flowed more readily when balanced by an equal amount of physical work, as if the mind-body union had reached a new agreement, a contract that I might not have been a conscious party to but was now being governed by.

In fact, I was really enjoying several hours a day of yard work. I had discovered an invasive plant in my front yard – curiously in the “contemplation” and “journey” parts of the feng shui bagua – which was strangling the heather and heuchera I had planted. I felt compelled to “declutter” the garden. I remembered a gardener who used the phrase “getting rid of the death.” This was a new feeling: weeks ago, I would have said that weeding was boring, banal, too ordinary to enjoy. Now, I laughed at that phrase and felt galvanized by my mission to save my plants from the strangling weed with the pretty yellow buttercup-like flower.

So, I took a break from the writing and didn’t feel guilty about it. I went to buy more compost and peat moss; on the way to the hardware store, I saw a puppy playing with its leash and got the image I needed to close the piece I’d been writing.

I had had an idea in taiiiquan earlier: that when a desire within us connects with the “flow of the world” – where one could substitute the word “Dao” or “Ground of Being” or “God” for that phrase – then work is not so much about force or effort but about connection and flow. Then, I thought to ask where that desire within us would come from: if that desire, too, came from the “Ground of Being”, then it was another circle, another connection of self to the world, where nothing would get in its way.

This week, I liked a piece on Brainpickings.org: Ira Glass on how there might be a difference between one’s taste and one’s ability to execute at the outset of a creative career. His counsel was “Do a lot of work.” Yes, show up and the muse shows up, I thought: yes, the work itself improves the work. But I decided to opt out of the Puritanical aspect of that advice: perhaps the work gets done not so much by effort and force as by grace and flow, when we can connect with Source and find where our hearts’ desire meets the world’s.