Move It, Move It!

I’ve struggled for several weeks to write my August blog post. So many ideas, so little time, so many distractions. 

This morning I had a good idea. A eureka moment. Well, maybe an uh-duh moment, whichever way you want to look at it. Actually, I had quite a few of both types of moments since my last post and I could list a string of titles for the essays I never wrote.

It’s a tricky business, not following thoughts when the mind is simply monkeying around and then turning around and following thoughts when the mind is coaxing us into creative awareness. Knowing when to follow and when to let go, when to move and when to rest is a key to mastering not only the mind, but life itself. Moment / movement. Movement / moment. 

Story isn’t any different than life. When we are captivated with a particular piece of writing, then we’ve immersed ourselves in the flow of a successful narrative. A narrative always moves forward, just as life does.

It doesn’t matter if  we are tackling fiction, nonfiction, a dissertation, a technical manual, or even a poem. Each piece of writing has a particular flow, despite the conflicts or contrasts inherent in the work. Knowing how to control the narrative flow in order make writing engaging and understandable is the key to keeping readers turning pages. 

Flow implies movement. If you’re checking your thesaurus, flow also implies a current, a tide, or a flux. Narratives have low and high tides, a fluidity of motion in which it sometimes gushes forward in floods of action and sometimes slows to a trickle of description or exposition. But that movement must make total sense within the context of the particular experience inherent in a narrative. 

Writers must control movement in their narratives. In my freelance editing work and in my own writing, I often have to pare away extra information that slows down an otherwise engaging story. Usually this extraneous information comes in the form of a descriptive passage – exposition – or character thoughts inserted in the midst of an action scene in fiction,  memoir, or creative nonfiction. These passages are like annoying speed bumps that suddenly spring up while the piece is racing toward a narrative climax. Excessive or clumsy dialogue in fiction and creative nonfiction is another speed bump. So is too much exposition - telling rather than showing, which must be in a pleasing balance.

Sometimes narrative barriers come in the form of what I call “warming up”. As we’re revving up our writing engine, we create repetitive opening sentences in paragraphs or scenes. These don’t always occur in the opening page or pages of stories, novels, or other narratives. In the case of book-length work, these call fall in any chapter. These phrases often look and sound like different, discrete pieces, but a careful editor or reader will see a setting motif or a character action multiplied or repeated. Careful tightening of prose usually catches these extra sputters, which allows for swifter and smoother narrative movement.

There are other dangers ahead. Don’t confuse action with movement. Sometimes writers mistake the two. Sometimes perfectly good, active scenes don’t move a plot or a narrative forward. Experts call this lateral movement. Delete! Take inspiration from filmmakers who metaphorically leave lots of perfectly interesting stuff on the cutting room floor.

Another danger - over-explanation sometimes feels like movement. Don’t underestimate your readers’ intelligence.

One of the best ways to master narrative movement is simply to read beautifully written work of any type. Wrap your brain around the patterns of successful narrative movement and you’ll tend, for the most part, after you’ve found your own voice, to create work with greater fluidity. Reading is an important part of mastering the writing craft. 

This doesn’t mean that reading every classic or award-winning contemporary book that comes along will magically allow you to write perfect or nearly perfect first drafts. Any experienced writer understands that good writing comes in the rewriting. Sometimes the muse will high-five us and inspire a nearly flawless piece to pop through. But mostly we face extensive revision. Blood, sweat, and tears rewriting. Not only to catch simple errors in grammar and punctuation, but to fill in narrative gaps or exert that picky polish with vivid verbs and specific nouns, the good word choices that make prose sing. 

In some cases, rewriting suggests paring away wordy or flowery writing into leaner and meaner prose. Always, to achieve the all-important narrative movement, writers must craft sentences that flow into the next in an effortless and compelling story stream. Central to that process is ordering words in a natural rhythm that lends to that natural flow.

Hand-in-hand with revision comes practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter if we write 10 minutes or 10 hours a day. The point is that by continually moving forward with our reading and writing, we’ll gradually internalize all the facets of skillful reading and writing. This takes time, patience, and consistent effort.

Just keep going. You gotta move it, move it!

Sitting with Warrior: Interview with Carl Hitchens

By now I figured that some of you might be tired of reading about my writing and my pain and suffering. I thought maybe, dear reader, you might enjoy thinking about someone else’s writing and their pain and suffering!

Sometimes you read a book that smacks you right in the brain bucket. Sitting With Warrior slammed me with unusual power because it has spiritual relevancy that begs to be examined.

Without further adieu, I’ll share my Amazon book review and a short interview with author Carl Hitchens, a Washington, D.C. native who currently lives in N. Arizona:

Around the time author Carl Hitchens was a young, green Marine entering his first hot LZ in the jungles of Vietnam, I was a young countercultural student demonstrating against the unpopular war in the streets of Middle America. You might say we were on the opposite ends of a spectrum. In his sobering first book, Sitting with Warrior, Hitchens generously took me to his war, and also to sit with Grandfather Warrior, his internal spiritual teacher, who reveals the sweet spot of equanimity between these two destinies. I came away from my reading understanding better how one can embrace the seemingly irreconcilable differences between war and peace.

Hitchens has clearly spent a lifetime probing the depths and shadows of his war experience to find “the beauty in the breaking”. Sitting with Warrior is a richly woven tapestry of light and shadow, fact and fantasy, prose and poetry that soars far beyond the boundaries of the tepid patriotic and political rants of ordinary war literature. This little volume pierces the heart of consciousness itself and ultimately merges the creator and the destroyer, and by healing that dichotomy within the warrior, also bridges the paradox that lives within us all.

KR: If there’s any weakness in Sitting With Warrior, in my opinion it is that the voices of the seeker and the teacher are too similar. Both are exceedingly articulate and knowledgeable. The seeker seems to have done quite a bit of homework before we see him sitting with Warrior. Was this a deliberate choice in your portrayal of the two characters? 

CH:  As far as the similarity of the voices of the seeker and the teacher goes, it wasn’t an intentional stylistic choice. It just happened. But when I look back, it makes perfect sense. Warrior is not merely a Native American of a specific nation, predisposed by a former physical past life to speak in a cultural-period way. He is a transcendent being beyond racial, cultural, gender, and even “species-ist” singularity. He is the universal, consciousness-quickening spiritual dynamic in all life forms, individuated within the specificity of each life form he inhabits as the indwelling teacher.

After departing the exotic mystery and peril of Vietnam and its warfare, the seeker spent years processing “his” war. But he did so privately within his own personal consciousness. But sorting out his own true voice from all the others and their judgments was no easy task.

Though he found a spiritual grounding that validated the nobility of his overall life, he still was unable to put his war in proper perspective with noble accomplishment. He needed to understand his journey to war and through war to know if he acquitted himself according to his own heroic ideals. 

This soul-searching came to a head, when after 35+ years, the seeker located one of the Marines of his old unit in ‘Nam through email. This event was a catalyst for him to seek out an understanding that had eluded him over the years. A determination to get clear on Vietnam before connecting in the flesh with those he had fought with.

From then on, an intensity to know the current manifestation of himself compared to his Marine-self in Vietnam consumed him. His sleep time, his day dreams, his spontaneous and formal contemplations all gravitated in this direction. As he witnessed and recorded these journeys into self, Warrior figuratively and literally (as an aspect of his own self) appeared. Understanding beyond his own ken typified the seeker’s treks to Warrior’s campfire. At these times in sitting with Warrior, the seeker’s self merged with the universal and the realization he sought arrived like a lost relative.

KR: Your quest to understand your experiences in Vietnam and to relay your observations to others obviously led you to write this book. Did you have any other motivations or issues that inspired you to pick up a pen and move beyond your aspirations as a poet?

CH:  Vietnam was not simply a crucible for survival, but, more important, a spiritual lathe cutting so deep that I couldn’t ignore it. There was a triumphant feeling that surrounded my going and returning that was unexplained by the usual measures assigned to taking up arms: moral justification, victory-defeat, honor-dishonor, worthiness-unworthiness. Getting to the source and the reason for my lingering sense of positive accomplishment, despite contrary messaging, was important to me.

I journaled about the war for years, seeking not simply to record my experience, but to scale down its enormity into a manageable size I could get a handle on. The other thing that pushed me into this direction was that I couldn’t hear my own voice in the body of writing on Vietnam. Something was missing from it for me, something I thought was not only essential to my story, but to others’, as well. Not merely veterans, but all Americans, perhaps all the world.

KR: You did that brilliantly. Any other thoughts?

CH:  Another important reason for my wanting to bring the book out at this time was to help present military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. While their reception is far more positive than we ‘Nam vets experienced, they nevertheless will have their own readjustment issues to contend with. Many realizations they will have are still years off, so that the initial body of their writing and sharing is not fully mature. I think my sharing will broaden their maturing voice more quickly.

KR: I think many will be grateful that you took the time and put forth the energy to publish this book. Do you have anything in progress?

CH:  I’ve been so consumed with promoting Warrior that I haven’t directed much time to other specific writing projects. However, I keep exhorting myself to put the finishing touches on my poetry manuscript, Shades of Light, and get it circulating among first-time poetry book contests.

KR: I’m also curious about your feelings toward war. If you could wave a wand and end all wars today, would you do that and why?

CH:  Rather than wave a wand to end all wars, I would rather reveal the seed of war, which I believe is the misunderstanding and concomitant misuse of our natural drive to perfection. The need to change things, improve on things, to manage things is, at its deepest root,  a desire to bring more perfected form into being. Distrusting life and other life forms, because of life’s seeming uncertainty, prods in us a desire to control the process, to eliminate the uncertainty. This puts life—human, animal—in opposition to itself. This is the perversion of the warrior-within, the narrowing down of “us” into “us and them.”

To explain this in an ultimate, effective way that would touch people not as an idea, but as the self-revealing nature of their inner selves . . . well that would be the next book. If only I could pull it off.

KR:  I bet you can – and will. You have readers waiting!

Drumtalk - Sitting with Warrior

Direct comments and questions to drumtalk at mac.com

UPDATE: See also - 

"The Hero's Journey"  at TheVeteransPTSDProject.com

Author interview : Indie Exchange

 Indie Writers Zone Indie Insider - Carl Hitchens

Words of honor: Vietnam vet battles PTSD through memoir - Prescott Daily Courier

 

 

©  2011, Kate Robinson & Carl Hitchens

Broken: Interruptions and Writer’s Block

I’ve been popping my head out of the rabbit hole and scanning the horizon now and then. I can’t say there are many pleasant sights. The world seems to be teetering on the brink of – um, something . . .

Summer is usually a light-hearted, energetic, and creative time for me, but what I’m feeling most is uncertainty. Like I’m the smackee caught in a perpetual smack-a-mole game, bracing for the next blow.

This is not good form, entertaining all these restless and doomerish thoughts. Perhaps the wave of current events predisposes me to a semi-permanent state of post-traumatic stress disorder.

At any rate, a lot of things seem to be broken.

I’ve had a solid week of broken stuff. This means my projects go on hold while I engage in necessary repairs and purchases. It means I struggle for an hour to right a confused printer only to have it suddenly refuse to communicate with the computer again for the tenth time. When I go out and buy a new printer, instead of relief, I find I’ve just spent over an hour carefully choosing a rather handsome one for the combination of features, reputation, and cost, only to find that it has a fatal defect. Instead of rebirth and renewal, I have a stillbirth on my hands. Only I don’t know about the defective chip in the printhead tape until I’ve struggled with the installation for three hours and finally call technical support in the morning.

When I rebox the darn thing, drag it back to the store, exchange it, and reinstall the (second) new one (in minutes this time), then the landline goes out. There’s some sort of area problem, only I don’t figure that out until I’ve spent a half hour trying to post a repair order online, and then another half hour spinning in an endless voice mail loop when I reach for the cell phone. When one of my loved ones gets through the loop on their first attempt, I know I’m a magnet for jellyfish.

At least the landline dial tone spontaneously reappears, but when that’s a go, the garage door opener expires. Then the internet goes down about the time the garage door guy has replaced the switch three hours after his ETA. Only the internet doesn’t come back up with the usual “repair connection” mouse click. Some human genius who refuses to own up to the deed has tried to clear the router and modem by disconnecting cables rather than the power cords, and placed one back in the wrong jack. Why is it we check the thing that matters most last?

*Sigh*

I have a new keyboard for my laptop sitting in its shipping box – you know all the rules about water and keyboards – but now I’m afraid to install it. This should be a simple 15-minute operation, but the way things are going, I have visions of my beloved and invaluable laptop disintegrating or exploding into space if I touch a screw.

In between my technology struggles are a whole raft of things that go along with having two teens leaving the nest – graduation preparations, college loan documents, entrance essays and videos, and on and on – you know, normal put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other stuff that should go well but doesn’t always, eating up the hours.

The good thing is that these jellyfish – piles of them! – are small obstacles. I’m thankful for small obstacles and disasters because they seem to dispel even larger obstacles and disasters and give me something to blog about.

Sometimes I find that these involuntary breaks from writing do me some real good even though I chafe at them. I get insanely happy when I finally have a workday with no interruptions. Karma, or fate, or that gosh darn cruel muse gave me a break one day out of the last ten. I don’t mean a break from my writing, but a chance to write for a change. I latch onto a chance to write like a mutt with a tasty bone. I growl at others to stay away, something I need to work on.

Anyway, I spent a good twelve hours that day frolicking in a manuscript and revising. I found that my absence from the work was a boon. I re-entered the project with a fresh and eager mind, re-visioning the strengths and weaknesses of it in a new light, which is really the point of writing and editing, no?

This is why it’s always good to slow down and let your work simmer. It’s natural to do this after completing a draft, but sometimes these infernal and frustrating breaks in the middle are even better. My subconscious mind seems to have worked that much harder for me while I was whinging (as they say in the UK, rhymes with binging) over the interruptions than it would have with my active, daily participation. Sometimes our subconscious minds just need a little space.

Life is funny like that. Things happen for a reason, and sometimes dealing with stuff like broken printers, phones, routers, and garage door openers has a cosmic overtone (I picture confronting a jellyfish and having a sundog burst out of it, sci-fi style).

You could apply this principle to difficult manuscripts and the spectre of writer’s block. I’ve never felt that there is such an animal. Yes, there are times when writing doesn’t go well or fallow periods (I typed gallow periods!) in which the spirit is willing but the mind goes blank.

Stuckness always happens for a reason. More often than not, writer’s block is simply a signal that there’s something wrong with a manuscript. Our subconscious minds know this and refuse to go further until the problem is corrected. The problem could be an awkward scene, a character defect, or that we’re telling a story from the wrong POV. Whatever the issue, we’re grounded until we’ve solved it. We often refuse to accept this and keep trying to go over, under, or around the problem rather than letting the work simmer.

These writing dilemmas usually fall away with a sudden realization. This may not happen as quickly as we’d like. In fact, I can despair here again why we check the thing that matters most last. At any rate, these creative impasses are rarely solved by the rational mind. Solutions seem to appear from the intuitive netherworld, a gift from the subconscious mind. This undermind, as I call it, basks in creative ferment and works very hard on our behalf. All we have to do is wait patiently (or impatiently, as is often the case) until it sends up a eureka moment signal. 

Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to ask the subconscious mind to help, please-please. Like anyone else, it responds nicely to well-mannered requests. Asking may even spur it to respond quicker. The subconscious mind also works when we haven’t asked it to, as in the case of my string of interruptions being rewarded with a little more clarity when I returned to my work.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can use these broken times to our advantage. They don’t feel good, but sometimes the struggle opens up to become the path. Not that it’s easy to let go and let things happen naturally. This takes practice and lots of reminders. Building new, positive habitual patterns is as hard to accomplish as undoing negative habitual patterns. Clue: in Buddhist philosophy, it’s said that more miseries come from trying to avoid misery. . .

So celebrate your broken moments. Embrace uncertainty. Do what you have to do. Have faith that your subconscious mind works even when you can’t. Have patience. Just keep going.

Dreams Dissolve Without Warning

In my universe, the month of May began with the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been discovered and killed in a raid in Pakistan. It’s closing with a Christian sect prediction of the Biblical Rapture that didn’t materialize, punctuated by all too frequent real-life earthquakes and destructive storms. We seem to be lurching from big event to bigger event and back again. I’m a fairly imaginative fiction writer, and I couldn’t make some of this stuff up! Real life is so awe-inspiring at the moment that I find myself reading much less fiction and many more news features, op-eds, and narrative non-fiction books.  

I’ve had a dozen different thoughts this month about what to write for this blog post. Out of those dozen ideas, maybe half of them would have yielded solid essays. But I didn’t write them down and my laziness led to loss. That’s probably a testament to keeping an idea notebook or file. I have one, but didn’t note any of the elusive thoughts inspired by either by randomness, the day’s newsworthy events, or maybe something I saw in the news or read on another writer’s blog.  

Also, I meant to do the next post on a Keats quote I mentioned in my last post, but I didn’t note this and then forgot about my plan! It wasn’t until I finished this installment and copied it into my long document of all my blog entries did I notice my previous intention! 

That’s a double jellyfish moment, for sure. 

The writing life is like that. If you don’t pluck them from the ether, ideas and the inspiration to use them evaporate:

Inspiration

Sheer as pearldust

stories flutter

at poets’ tongues

butterfly exuberant

Speak freshly

dreams dissolve

without warning

KR 1997

  

You’d think I’d learn my own lesson. I keep a pocket notebook with me wherever I go, and spend half my life in front ofa computer and near pencil and paper, but I still let ideas vanish. I often make the excuse that a good idea is so memorable I’ll never forget it. Either that or I’m in the middle of something I don’t want to interrupt. Or I’m simply being lazy. But in this age of information overload coupled with my aging brain and ADD, I forget my bright ideas very quickly. 

So act on your creative thoughts immediately. Jot them down, whether on paper or in a Word file. Interrupt yourself to do this even though you might not use your ideas immediately. I’ve perused old lists and then written poems, essays, and stories years after writing down the initial idea down. You never know what powerful writing might spring from a sudden idea if you allow yourself the grace to accept it.

That’s not to say that we need to grasp at all thoughts. As we do with our writing, we have to know what thoughts to follow and what thoughts to let go. It’s appropriate to simply observe thoughts arising in our minds without chasing them. This is because the human mind is prone to chatter; most of this chatter is rather useless and even debilitating. Attaching to some thoughts and continuing to follow them, as in letting our brain stay “on automatic”, leads to habitual patterns in our behavior that are hard to overcome. 

These are the thoughts that bind us to our own worst fears. Usually these thoughts run in the direction of self-hatred or hatred for others, ranging from envy to bigotry. Or these thoughts are tied to anxiety and insecurity. Some simply replay past issues, things we regard with negative emotions like resentment. 

Sometimes these binding thoughts are more practical, but they create narrow parameters for our lives. You know, like the ones that tell us that we must always prioritize things like making grocery lists and cleaning the bathroom. Sometimes we stand in our own creative path rather than letting some of the daily stuff go. Sometimes we have important, creative missions we effectively avoid by safely adhering to routine. 

We often spend considerable energy reviewing thoughts that bind us to a past that is over or a future that doesn’t exist (or even a present that lacks creative spark). Living in the present moment frees our minds to respond more appropriately and creatively to life as it happens. This is sort of like narrowing a beam of light onto the task at hand, a practice of concentration that’s very useful for creative work. 

So our thoughts are the threads that bind us to our own suffering, that create the webs that become obstacles to our creativity and eventual enlightenment. Both the negative and ordinary thoughts that bind us can be handled by simply observing them and watching them evaporate, like watching a time-lapse video of clouds forming and dissolving, swirling eternally across the sky. The true nature of our minds is like the sky, pure and boundless above those clouds. This practice of limiting mental chatter in order to maintain awareness is the point of meditative practice. 

When we’re engaged in deep creation, whether as writers and artists, or cooks and inventors, neuroscientists have discovered that our brains produce the gamma and theta brainwaves that also occur during deep meditation. We go into “the zone”. I suspect by training ourselves to clear unnecessary chatter that we open our mind for clearer and more creative thought. 

An open mind allows our own underlying wisdom, compassion, and creative energy to shine through. We all have this awake Buddha mind, this connected creativity – it’s the eternal sunshine that those clouds and storm fronts obscure only temporarily. The clouds are ephemeral but the sun’s light and energy is constant. 

The never-ending motion of waves at the ocean’s surface is another analogy or metaphor for the mind. Underneath the surface of the restless ocean lies a vast layer of imperturbable water. The waves are similar to the thoughts that constantly arise in our mind and disappear back into the source. The practice of mindfully observing arising thoughts and allowing them to disappear without following them makes us all happier people. 

We gaze with wonder at the rainbows and sundogs that appear unexpectedly in the sky. We view them with a sense of joy because they’re a metaphor for our luminous nature and our innate creative spark. The ideas our minds gift us with appear suddenly like rainbows. Cultivating only the most positive, necessary thoughts clears the way for creating good art or finding creative solutions to mend the world’s woes. 

Perspiration must follow inspiration. So when creative ideas appear unbidden, we writers should make the extra effort to note these special thoughts and let our ordinary ones drift away . . .

The Paradox of Error

I use an old but simple writing submission database to track my writing submissions (and my voluminous rejections and rare acceptances). The program opens with a menu that contains an author quotation. Since I’ve used this program for years, I’ve read and saved most of the quotations a long time ago. I dig them up periodically for various purposes ranging from Facebook status updates, to e-mail signatures to writing prompts.

So, when I opened the program to record a story rejection this morning, an old quotation popped up. I don’t recall ever reading it before, but I surely  must have because the program only contains a hundred at most. Perhaps it simply didn’t resonate at other times the way it did today.

But that’s not the quotation I’m going to share with you.

HA! That’s the way sundog and jellyfish moments happen, without warning and sometimes on a big switcheroo. . .

When I copied the Keats quote in question and went to paste it into my authors’ quotation bank, I dropped it in front of another quotation that I had to have read previously, because  I copied and pasted it along with all the rest, one at a time. It must also have struck me today as being far more important than when I deposited it:

If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

~ Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)

I’m sure that Rabindranath Tagore, being the multidimensional spiritual leader he was, could expound on error and this quotation in ways that would leave us all breathless. I can’t do that, but his words struck me like lightning.

In the course of navigating through our writing and our lives, it is important to correct errors, no? It is often said that good writing comes not with the initial draft, but in the act(s) of revision. As writers, we spend a great deal of time polishing our work to the highest level that we can achieve, which is dependent upon our understanding or skill at the time. We try our best to not make mistakes.

Life is like that too – we make errors, we correct course. As we gain experience, we are able to correct course or revise more fluidly and are also able to avoid making previous errors.

However, Tagore seems to refer here to error in the context of paradox: Truth will be shut out if you shut the door to all error.

We do things wrong, we’re supposed to suffer, right?

Not always. We make a cake but forget an ingredient, or make a wrong turn on a city street, or glob the paint on the “wrong” way, or commit some sin or another. But instead of disaster, we create a new product, discover a wonderful new neighborhood, start a fabulous new painting technique, or by committing a sin – just a shameful, guilt-ridden word for error – we are liberated from some habitual tendency by gaining greater realization through the consequences of the action.

I think Tagore’s point about error as applied to the writing craft reveals this: not only are errors valuable in the sense of the learning derived from making them, but that by allowing error into our work in the most creative sense, this allows us to create deeper and better connected writing.

I suppose this topic could be handled better in a book-length discussion by a more masterful philosopher or writer, but in my nutshell exploration, I think the jist of finding truth in error in our writing life is to simply allow error to happen or to accept error when it happens.

Both writing and life flow better with less negative critique from the “internal editor”, the judgmental side of monkey mind. This is the essence of mind that perpetually chatters, that assigns black and white judgment rather than allowing the shades of gray inherent in life and creativity to show through. If we operate outside the editor mentality, then we avoid limiting possibilities and are able to look past the right or wrong binary and into the realm of paradox.

Grappling with paradox allows us to deepen our writing and get to those real nuggets of truth. This may mean allowing ourselves to write in a genre or style not embraced by the mainstream, by discovering something interesting or beautiful in work that we might first perceive as an error, or simply by patiently polishing our work by stages into something beautiful.

How many times have you written something that you felt was wonderful, only to discover that your crit group or the editor of your favorite literary magazine not only didn’t see your work in the same light, they didn’t see any light in it at all? While the input of others can be invaluable, you can’t expect them to fully understand your truth until you’ve fully revealed it in your work. (And another paradox here is that even when you get the work polished, it still won’t please all, and still be viewed as error!)

A first attempt at something rarely yields the best result, and whether you’re learning to bake the best cake in the world, painting a masterpiece, trying to find the most intriguing neighbourhood in Madrid, or working on an award-winning essay, it may take a whole lotta rounds and errors to find the jewel.

Error can bring us to the truth just as frequently as “not error” or the right stuff can. By accepting the paradox in our creative work and our lives, by embracing the shadow portions of ourselves and our work, we allow the truth and /or the greatest of relative truths to shine through.

In this regard, jellyfish can be sundogs, and sundogs can be jellyfish. If we don’t make errors and simply reject (or run from, or punish) error and live in the black and white world of conceptual thought, the binary thinking that makes error wrong and “not error” right, then it’s a lot harder to bask in the light of truth. We might not even understand what the full spectrum of truth is in any given situation until we make errors and grapple with them.

Truth is best revealed in prose and poetry, song and music, image and film when an artist has allowed the work to take wrong corners, to miss ingredients, or to accept unorthodox elements. When we seek to  control life with pre-conceived recipes for success or control our creative work with a list of rules, we are rewarded with limited understanding and limited results. Rule-bound thinking results in partial right or “not error”, but not the full-blooded, hearty truth.

Rules are usually applicable, especially in the context of non-negotiables like the Ten Commandants or watertight grammar rules, but the paradox of negotiating error and “not error” is the process that leads to deeper understanding, to truth. Accepting error is an inclusive process, related to the exhortation in my last blog entry to not quitting, to “just keep going.”

I make no claim to have any great grasp of Truth with a capital T, but we all have our own relative truth. This is what we strive to present in our writing, those words that come from the heart. Truth is the arrow released by our best work and it plunges into the soul of the observer. Allow yourself some error - to play with error, to celebrate it, even -  to allow truth to shine from your work.

As for the Keats quote, I guess that’s a story for next time!