Write without fear

How to be free in your writing

Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

Last month I held the first of the Mindful Writing Marathons. They are inspired by the teachings of Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, one of the most influential books I’ve read for my craft and developing a mindful writing practice. I had no idea how it would go before we started and I felt a little nervous. Unlike the workshops I teach, I was a writer too writing alongside the people who turned up. Despite my trepidation, it felt really good to be writer me for a change.

There were five of us there so as it was a small group, we were all able to read out what we wrote in response to each prompt. And as there was no critiquing or any comment at all on what we read out, it was a very freeing feeling.

Although we didn’t comment, you could feel the appreciation flowing from everyone for each others words through the screen, reflected in our big smiles and nods, and it was a really lovely experience. I am already looking forward to the next one.

I wanted to share some of the snippets that I wrote as the freedom of it was a truly great writing experience and I have come to love the act of communal writing. I also wanted to share them to show that when we are mindful writers, we don’t have to be writing for specific goals or stories every time we turn up to the page and we don’t have to focus on getting everything perfect. These snippets are unedited. I am going to be keeping all of the documents I write at these sessions in a folder and keep reading back now and then to see what themes are emerging. As these will be the things I need to write about and I can find stories and essays hidden away in these snippets that will be the subjects that really matter to me.

Sky

Blue-sky, cloudy sky, stormy sky, reach for the skies, blue-sky thinking. Changeable, reaching for something else, a different state of being, new ideas. We fly through the sky to get to faraway places. We look to the heavens for divine intervention. The sky fell in – disaster from above that’s beyond our control. It’s where the sun and the moon and the stars live. It’s where the Gods look down from. The colour of the sky can change our moods. But what is the sky exactly? Does it have a tangible form? Can you touch it? Can you feel it? What is it? Where is it? How high above us does the sky start? When you look across the sea it reaches right down to touch it. When you gaze up from the ground it seems eons away. When you’re in it in a plane are you still in the sky until the wheels touch the runway? If so, then we’re always in the sky. It starts at ground level. So we’re surrounded by the stars and the gods and the sun and the moon all the time.

Sea

It holds you up, it pulls you down, it tosses you around. It crashes, it swishes, it murmurs, it rolls, it thunders, it whispers. Home to millions of creatures, many of them strange and otherworldly, many of them no doubt still unknown. It carries seeds and stones and shells and boats from one side of the world to the other. We’ve given the sea different names in different places but it’s all one. The Atlantic and the Pacific and the Mediterranean and all the other seas we have named are just our divisions, our separation, of a single body of water that once covered our entire planet. Just like the borders and flags and nations we’ve used to separate the lands and all of us who live in them. Before the lines drawn on maps there were no countries, no immigration laws, no you can’t come here, you don’t belong here. We all belong to all the land and to all the sea and to each other.

Gold

Oh so precious. The gold rush. The gold standard. Gold star. Golden girls and boys. Golden sands. Why has gold become so important in our world? Why when the first nugget was ever found did it capture the mind of the discoverers and become a coveted thing? It’s not in keeping with the way to have put it on a pedestal. To make others want it so bad they’ll rob and cheat and lie and kill for it. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu said “If you over-esteem great men, people become powerless. If you over-value possessions, people begin to steal.” We created kings and have told ourselves these men are better, more important than others. We created jewels from the shiny rocks we found and have told ourselves that they are better, more important than the other, less shiny rocks. Maybe we need to tell ourselves a different story. Maybe the real story is that no person is better or more or less important than any other. Maybe the real story is that gold has no real value at all compared to the flint I pick up from the ground, the shell I hold at the beach. Maybe the real story is that every single thing and every single person is oh so precious.

Writing Prompt

Set a timer for 10 minutes each time and start writing from these prompt words. Don’t overthink it. Just go with the first thing that comes to your mind and write on from there.

• Light

• Free

• Mind

I hope you enjoyed reading my snippets and enjoy the writing prompts. If you want to share your writing from them in the comments, I would love to read them.

If you want to join us for the next Mindful Writing Marathon it would be great to have you there. It is on Saturday 16th November at 11.00-13.00 UK time. You can book here, or it is included with membership here at The Mindful Writer Substack.

With love,