5/11(Morning writing.): I think of what my student R. said about the emotion going out of something once he had written it – and I remember walking in the Basin Range sage and basalt desert east of Bend and realizing I didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to use it. I didn’t want to occupy it with my story about it. I didn’t want to fence it in with words. I just wanted to be in it with gratitude.
5/14 (writing circle): I had run away from the relentless quasi-hipness of the Oregon town I was living in. I drove east into the raw desert south of the ghost town of Millican. I told the sagebrush and malpais and huge sky and hard cold wind that I wouldn’t write about them. I walked miles without recording in my mind what seemed to hold me. I felt cradled and buffeted and so much a part of what I moved through that I was nothing but walking, breath and gratitude.
I’ve kept that promise except to send a few field notes to a friend in 2010. I walked the dirt roads, ORV trails and rocky paths. Sometimes I climbed up and into the basalt fumeroles. Afterwards my hands felt abraded and alive. I remembered rock climbing. I remembered trusting my body. Sometimes I climbed a slope to a juniper studded ridgeline, picked my way through knee-high boulders and loose scree and when the ridgeline sloped down to the desert, followed it. I was fascinated by everything: the scruffy sage, storm-carried trails of pebbles, rusted barbed wire, broken glass, black clouds gathering in the west, the gold rose of sunset, the shriek of a hawk, weather on my skin. Nothing amazing happened. It didn’t matter. I had been emptied of naming. I was amazement.
Tonight I break my vow to that place a little south of the Oregon Badlands. And I understand that whether I intended it ot not, I walked the basin-range desert a few miles from Millican as a writer. The place occupied me. And travelled home with me to this page.
Always wait and listen, learn from
experience. Learn from your daily life. —Sri Swami Satchidananda
For you: write for twenty minutes about that which you have not wanted to write about. As always, I’d love to see what you’ve written. The first person to send their writing to https://www.breakthroughwriting.net/contact-mary/ will win a half hour writing consultation with me.
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