Losing the words
When life freezes your fiction flow
My words have gone. They had just returned after a period of upheaval in my life that meant there was no space in my head for storytelling. Then at the start of this month, we found a long-term accommodation option. Knowing that we had somewhere to be and wouldn’t have to expend so much time and mental energy on finding the next place to stay and moving between them (we’ve stayed in four different places so far this year), had an instant impact on my creative brain.
The day after we got back from seeing the new place I finished a story I started four months ago, edited two more and sent them off to an editor for feedback. The next day, I read through my novella-in-flash and made the final editing notes to get it ready for publication. The day after that my mother-in-law passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
The funeral is next week and then a couple of days later we are moving into the new place, which is in a beautiful rural spot next to the river. It’s half an hour’s drive from the beach and also from a large city, which is home to several of my dearest friends that I haven’t lived close to for almost twenty years.
Since Margaret passed away, the part of my brain that creates my stories has stopped again. But I know it will come back. When I first started writing fiction again as an adult and I had times when I didn’t write, I worried that the words were gone forever. That I’d only had so many words for stories available and they’d been used up. Now I know that isn’t true. But even though I’m not writing stories, I do write every day in other ways. I have been writing the content for my Mindful Fiction course and for the Storytelling with the Tao course. I’m writing this. I write to my friends. I write snippets and lists. All of this writing will feed my fiction when that part of my brain fires up again.
As will the reading I do. I am currently reading “How You Live Is How You Die” by Pema Chödrön and I can’t recommend it enough. Yes it’s about dying, which is something that many people in my culture find hard to discuss, but it’s also about living and loving. It has made me laugh out loud several times. There is a part in the beginning of the book that reminded me of a writing retreat I ran a while back where the conversation turned to death one evening. I said I wasn’t afraid of it anymore and one of the writers there told me I was depressing! In this book, the author talks about a meditation retreat she ran and that when she told people when they arrived the focus was going to be on dying, one of them said: “Bummer!”
When your life has been so filled with loss, death isn’t something you can banish from your mind. But everything I have learned since I started on a journey of spiritual exploration, means I am no longer afraid to think about, talk about, and accept the fact of my own death, whenever that may come. Nor am I afraid of what might come after whereas when I was younger, I was terrified of the not knowing. Now I embrace the mystery and have a strong belief that there is nothing at all to fear.
All of which is not to say that I’m not sad about all the people I have lost —I’m sad for myself and the others left behind, and for all of my loved ones who have passed and all they’ll miss out on in this life. But I am also happy that they got to experience what they did and that I got to spend time with them, laugh with them, and share amazing moments of being alive together. I am blessed to be here and to have been able to share so much with so many wonderful people. It’s that incredible fact of being alive that will bring back my words when the time is right.
With love,
Amanda x
Thanks for reading. Please do share this with others if you think it could help them with their own lack of words sometime.
Amanda, thanks for sharing these thoughts and reflections. I also loved Pema Chodron's book. One of my favorite poems came to mind as I was reading your words. It's called The Dawn Appears With Butterflies, and is an earlier poem by Joy Harjo, but can be found in her new collection: Weaving Sundown In A Scarlet Light. I'll share these two stanzas in the hope you may enjoy them:
Someone is singing in the village. And the sacredness of all previous dawns resonates. That is the power of the singer who respects the power of the place without words, which is as butterflies, returning to the sun, our star in the scheme of stars, of revolving worlds.
And within that the power of the dying is to know when to make that perfect leap into everything. We are all dying together, though there is nothing like the loneliness of being the first or the last, and we all take that place with each other.
Thanks for this, Amanda. Although settled now, I can empathise with your feelings associated with not having a permanent home. We (with my partner, Jane) were renting privately for several years. We had to deal with landlords suddenly deciding to sell the house, a major drop in income meaning we eviction for non-payment of rent, and more. We had two periods of sofa surfing - effectively homeless. At one point we were told by Shelter "you're not too old, too young, or too ill, so you'll be okay on the streets". At other times I have experienced stress and anxiety, and Jane is in chronic pain.
All this is support your experiences not being compatible with writing. Pema Chodron definitely helps, along with Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat Zinn, and living mindfully as a whole. This is sometimes easier said than done, of course.
I appreciate my membership here and your commitment to mindful writing. I'm writing again, and back into photography. Money is stressful (not exactly breaking news) and how to monetise writing is never far from my thoughts, even though the answer is known to be "with great difficulty".
I enjoyed reading your books and am looking forward to reading more of your work, Amanda. Here's to better times ahead for us all.