Friday, August 29, 2008

Is a Chair Just a Chair?

Meeting with a writer today, we tried to figure out what happens, exactly, when we write about our lives.

As the remembering of our lives comes through our finger tips to drop like dew on the page—it is as clear to us as that chair across the room, that interweaving of wicker fashioned for a human to sit upon. But the moment we attempt definition, it seems impossible. For what is that chair, really??? It is something now but it is also something alive, growing in a field, infused with sunlight, pressed by the wind and touched by the hands of workers who wove it into being.

The chair is a chair but is it really just a chair? Of course not!!!

“It’s time travel,” she finally said bluntly, truth delivered on simple wings.

That’s it.

Writing about our past, via the present moment, sets the writer on a journey in time to gather the lessons needed for the now and the future. It’s a vision quest without getting lost or causing harm (hopefully).

That is what happens when we come together, you and I, to write your life on the page. We create a time travel container, we develop the rituals together for you to go and return without too much disturbance to your now and then we weave together a something that you might sit in for a long time. That something might be called “a book” or “a memoir” or “a novel” or “a poem” or “a song” or "a documentary" or "film" or it will be an unnamable something else.

~

I’ve just returned from a ten day intensive with Joanna Macy, known as "The Whole Truth Teller" where I learned how to merge her Work that Reconnects into my own work which I call Writing Life. If you are unfamiliar with the work of Joanna, please go to her site to learn more. Her memoir, Widening Circles rocked my world--the life, the experience, the honesty, the pain, the cracking open of her soul over and over again--are exactly what I have been begging for in a woman teacher.

In her presence, I felt as if I had finally met someone more honest than myself. After ten days of working with her in interactive processes that open heart and mind to the truth, I continue to marvel at her fearless capacity to be so authentic. Her truth and her style of truth telling are exactly what we need now. There is no more time to bury our heads in the sands of blame, fear, anger, worry and what was. We must awaken. We must reach out. We must touch each other and be fully alive.

We must!

I am excite to bring my new, "Whole Truth Telling" teachings into the one on one work and to the workshops being offered this fall. Please Contact mefor available times, costs and dates!

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