Writing to Help Us When the World Hurts: To Write Well, Write Truthfully

How do we write well? Probably thousands have written about this. Certainly, writing is about language. It is about metaphor, rhythm, imagination. Experience. It can seem it’s about which words to use, or how to find a unique story or approach. But from my point of view, it really is about understanding the mind and body that writes. No mind, no words. It’s about being truthful and real, or discovering what’s truthful and real for us.

If we fake it, our readers will know it. We will know it. The plot or argument won’t hold together. When it’s truthful to us, it will engage others.

And it will feel “right” inside us. We don’t merely know a truth intellectually—we feel it. A word of beauty is a path for feeling to follow, or it reveals the path feeling took to get to meaning. Without feeling, words are empty code. Dead. When a sentence feels off or incomplete or it’s struggling for breath, it’s wrong, no matter how attractive it looks. We shouldn’t get distracted by good looks. It’s the heart that counts.

And in this frightful time, when fear is being manipulated to drive a wedge between us and others, and with ourselves, our world. Truth is not just buried but twisted by lies. Uncovering what the truth is, and being able to face what we feel, is now an act of defiance and resistance to DT’s march to dictatorship. Looking at ourselves might at times feel too fearsome to attempt, but never has it been more necessary. Our future depends on us finding the right moments to look within and motivate ourselves to join with others to act for the greater good of all.

Feelings arise before words and memories do. They arise with the first hint of awareness. We’ve all probably experienced not knowing what we want to say or write until we say it, or put something down on paper, or in our computer. The act of writing, putting something in front of our eyes, and listening to the words in our mind as we write or say them, can open the conscious mind to the depths normally unconscious. It’s creating and thinking. It’s revelation. What I’m saying is obviously not new. Writing can be an art and an ancient form of therapy.

So, the first step in writing and creating is awakening an awareness of feeling. We all have our own times or ways to feel some clarity, feel a pathway to creativity. Mine involves meditating, exercising and reading, or writing first thing in the morning when my mind is clear. Meditation clears my mind and increases awareness and focus. Exercise energizes me and clears away blocks and obsessions. Walking in natural settings is amazing. And reading nonfiction that interests me can provide a stimulus, imagery, insights, and intellectual challenges. Sometimes, what sparks our creativity is feeling an inner response to what someone else says or has done.

And then, letting go. Free associating. No editing. Just clearly watching what arises and listening to the winds in ourselves and out in the surrounding world and honestly recording whatever we see or hear.

The philosopher, psychologist, and writer Dr. Jean Huston said in a workshop I attended that immersing ourselves in poetry makes beauty more readily available to us. Beauty will then percolate through the unconscious and emerge in one’s speech and writing. The same with reading stories, psychology, philosophy, history and such. Reading reveals doors which meditation unlocks….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

**An earlier form of this article was published by the Swenson Book Development website, and by my website:  https://irarabois.com/write-well-write-truthfully/

Sometimes, the Mind Reveals its Depths: Maybe We Carry Ancient Caves in Us Even Today, as We Sing Our Moments onto Their Walls as We Live

I was talking on the phone with a friend who was concerned and anxious about the psychological health of their child. After I hung up, I felt how vulnerable he was and I am ⎼  that we all are. That we are all, every minute, so close to psychological and physical pain, to suffering. We have our routines, beliefs, and understandings, our relationships that create and maintain our sense of normalcy and reality. But that sense is not always as secure, nor as complete and skillful as we’d like.

 

And then I felt, no, I could see something almost indescribable. In my mind, along with the reality of my home, and the trees, bushes, and plants outside, appeared something like a tunnel, darkened by countless ages of humans and the earth. And the suffering of my friend and their child seemed to fit so readily in that tunnel; all our fears, worries, suffering fit in that tunnel as if it was made to do just do that. There was so much emotional pain there, and so much more in addition. Joy? Insight? So much of what all of us shared.

 

And it was so vast; anyone could easily get lost in it. I could easily get lost in it. It could be fearful and yet somehow comforting, intimately, infinitely comforting. And then it was seemingly gone. The birds sang. The food my wife was cooking sizzled.

 

What was it? Was it a revelation or like a waking dream? Did I imagine it, or see something that rarely shows its face? Was it a glimpse of something always with us, but beyond our grasp or control? Or maybe a random image or delusion?

 

Maybe it was related to the collective unconscious that Carl Jung described, filled not only with our own memories and the memories of all beings, but archetypes, the universal or innate patterns of imagery and thinking that have appeared throughout human history? Maybe it was related to what Australian aboriginals call the dreaming, or other cultures call the great dreaming of the earth.

 

In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin describes creator beings who sang the world into existence; song being the original speech of humans. The origin songs were called songlines, or dreaming tracks, and mark the routes followed by creator-beings as they carved the earth during the Dreamtime, or time of creation.

 

But dreaming tracks are not solely about the past. They mark both a where and a when, a time and all time, or the continuous process linking the Aboriginal people to the land and heavens. According to Wikipedia, a knowledgeable person even today can navigate vast distances, cross deserts and mountains, by singing and following the directions in a songline.

 

Even in the daytime, it seems there’s an underlying stream of imagery running through our minds of which we’re only partly aware. It’s dream-like, in that it’s more emotional in organization than rational. All thoughts can share this dream-like quality, in that they can appear as real as day but be more of a personal fabrication, like a dream of night. So, there’s a bit of dreaming in the day and a bit of awake awareness at night….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

I Was Going to Write an Email: To Converse with Truth, Let Silence Speak

I was going to send an email to The Good Men Project about not being able to write a blog this week. For several years, I’ve sent in a piece almost every week. If I couldn’t do so, I informed the editors in advance. This time, I tried several ideas, but none coalesced into a finished piece. And I kept imagining what I could say about why or asking myself if I needed to say anything at all.

 

I started to question any excuses that popped into my head or the need to have any excuses. I started questioning my explanations, my pattern of thinking, my distractions. And suddenly, a realization of what I could write came clear to me. What was going on inside me became clear.

 

Why am I writing blogs? Why do we ever feel a need to justify doing what we need to do, or what is right?

 

It can be so difficult to put life first. When we are not immediately and physically threatened, and I’m so thankful there are no bombs falling here instead of the rain, it can be difficult to put the reality that we can lose all we have first, that we might die.

 

Even now, with two major wars in the world, with a climate emergency ⎼ with the leader of one of the two major political parties threatening that if he becomes President again he will be a dictator. He will take away our constitutional rights, to vote, to the rule of law and to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Or to say anything in opposition to what he says, or get good healthcare or have choices about our healthcare ⎼ it’s so difficult for many of us to feel the reality of this. To believe we might die. To prioritize this. This, now.

 

We have all these things we do, layers upon layers of habits, of patterns of thinking, prioritizing, passing time. We have our normal concerns, communities of concerns. Obligations. We have all the pain, joys, and memories we live with.

 

Yet, this morning, fresh from a long sleep, I woke up questioning so much. And what before was hidden became clear. What do I really feel? What should I write? Why hadn’t I completed a blog? Do I need to explain anything to anyone about how I’ve lived life?

 

And the freshness of just waking up, and questioning, with a willingness to look, and the desire to see what’s real, all the clouds in my mind were pushed apart….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

What Underlies Our Creativity? The Infinite and the Finite are Two Hands that Clap the World into Existence

When I was teaching secondary school, students often asked: Where does creativity come from? Does it come from me? Is it a gift we are born with? Does it arise from how we relate to our lives? Is it from the universe itself speaking?

 

In a similar way, I sometimes wonder how I can keep writing blogs. I try to write one a week, but sometimes don’t succeed and can barely say a word. I worry that I’ve run out of ideas. Other weeks, I write three or four blogs and it seems everything I see or hear has hidden treasure in it.

 

Sometimes, even if I have something to say for myself, I wonder if I have anything helpful to say to anyone else. When I was in college, and about to go out on a date, I feared I would run out of topics for conversation. Or if I had a paper to write, I wondered if I could come up with anything original or real to write about.

 

Right now, I’m looking out of my window and see the edge of the forest. At first, I see the forest, a whole grouping of trees, grass, the dried stalks of flowers⎼ all at once. Then I notice a rhododendron bush, with green leaves that shine even though it is very gray right now, and rain or snow seems about to burst from the air. Or just beyond it, the naked, old branches of a lilac ⎼ thin fingers reaching out to heaven.

 

Even in this seemingly simple setting, there is a vast universe of unrecognized details. At first, an unverbalized, un-languaged sensing, a taking everything in. Then, words arise, individual details, singular things are born, but the vision of the whole obscured.

 

To make sense of all of this, my mind utilizes patterns of thinking I’ve found useful in the past, theories about reality, memories of recent as well as distant events. Everything I have ever thought or felt is alive in this scene that stares back at me as I stare at it. But I’m only conscious of one bush, one tree, one Buddha statue covered with shades of green moss, one memory of feeling as gray as the air now looks.

 

And yet, every once and awhile, if I’m attentive⎼ if I take a moment to just breathe; to take a walk or meditate⎼ then the normal noise of rushing from one concern to the next is paused, juxtaposed against a blank screen. I get quiet enough to hear what before was hidden. Maybe feel that original, pre-language sensing. The pattern of my thoughts or assumptions pops out in my mind. And when I do read a word or hear someone speak, I have a much better chance of perceiving not only the words but the feeling and reality beyond the words.

 

Author Robert Pirsig, in Part II of his novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Ethics, talks about how, in science, the more you look, the more you see. This sounds simple until you get to his conclusions. Pirsig, speaking of his main character, says:

 

“He coined a law.… ‘The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.’ It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed to dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along….

 

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.” “[A]s you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it!”

 

Substitute logic for scientific method and a hypothesis jumps out at us. Reason and science increase our understanding. They allow humans to develop and survive. But reality far exceeds any rational thought about it—and the value of the world, of reality, far exceeds anything we can imagine, certainly exceeds any use we can imagine for any part of it…..

 

*To read the whole blog post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

A New Kind of Dream: Maybe A New Form of Reality

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been having a new kind of dream, or one that’s new for me; one that clearly changes its plot over a night but not its trajectory or theme.

 

The first one I remember occurred last week. It involved being asked to come back to the alternative secondary school where I taught for 27 years and teach one of my old classes. Maybe there was a shortage of teachers, or one would be out sick for a while. In one version, it was a philosophy course called Questions. In another, it was a history course, The Historical Development of Human Ideas.

 

The first course, Questions, was just that. It was built around what the students and I chose as the deepest questions in our lives. It always started with different versions of the same question: How do we face death? It always ended with what is an ethical life. In between, it could be about love, meaning, reality and truth. Or do we have free will, and what is mind?

 

The history class began by asking who are we? What, if anything, can we say is characteristic of us humans? And what are the biggest problems you are concerned about in the world today? We spent the first and second day analyzing which of these problems are most basic and underlie the others. Then, the rest of the year, answering: from the ancient beginnings of humanity, what do you think are the roots of these problems? The final exam would be following a strand through pre-history and history of how that problem changed and developed.

 

But in the dream, I questioned whether I knew enough to teach the history, or either course. Not only because so much of what we know about human history and pre-history has changed over the years, or been clarified. But because we, human society, has changed so much since I retired in 2012. The students are now in a far different place and are suffering so much. We’ve been facing the threats of DJT and covid and more clearly recognize the threat posed by the climate emergency.

 

We’ve gone through so many assaults on public education since President Reagan; but lately even more so, on what books can be allowed in a school library, and what courses can be taught. Whether the most accurate information on who we are as a species and who we are as a nation could be shared with students.

 

One question that was often asked by students then was: what are the roots of racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc.? That question is now outlawed in some states. Maybe the asking of all real, sincere questions will be outlawed next.

 

There’s been so much trauma over the last 6 or 7 years. Could the philosophy course even ask about death when we’ve seen so much violence and death? Or would it be even more important? In history class, would the teaching of the roots of hate be allowed? And what new questions would students have? One of the most frequently asked questions back then was How has our relationship to the environment changed over the years? And would the question today be, can we survive?

 

The more recent dream was even more dramatic….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

When Sleep Eludes Us: Instead of Focusing on the Sleep We’re Losing, Notice the Moment We’re Gaining

Last night, I fell asleep around 12:30 am and woke up about an hour later. It’s not unusual for me to wake up several times in the night due to pain and other reasons. Or to wish the hour was later and the night closer to being over. Or to hear myself wishing that for once, couldn’t I just sleep through the night. Then I tire of that.

 

I look outside the window at the night sky. The trees, stripped naked by winter, form a delicate lattice pattern made visible by a graying sky. The sight broadens my perspective. And I sit down and hold both the discomfort and pain that woke me up along with the sky that surrounded me and everything else. And I go back to bed and sleep.

 

I notice the quality of the night because I’ve learned from previous sleepless moments and writing about them how important it is to do so.

 

I learned that how I responded to waking up was crucial to getting back to sleep. And to be aware of my response required a specific sort of sensing, and monitoring, a mindful, open, non-judgmental one. One that allowed me to see the reality I was facing with more clarity.

 

Pain and sleeplessness can be so awful and disruptive. But maybe the worst part of it, and what deepens it into suffering, is feeling powerless before it or not knowing what caused it. If we think our chest pain is the beginning of a heart attack, we feel the pain more intensely than if we think we have stomach gas. If we’ve had the pain in the past and seen a doctor, received answers about what’s causing the symptom and how to treat it (and that it’s treatable), it’s often easier to face.

 

And when we are ready and can face what we feel, or expand our vision beyond it, we have the possibility of transforming it. In dreams and nightmares, when we run from the monster that chases us, it gets bigger. So far in my life, almost every time I turned towards the monster, it turned away from me or transformed into something either friendly or less fearsome.

 

So how we respond to what happens is as important as the fact we experienced it. Knowing this is powerful. It can take us out of our ideas of who we are and let us return to the broader reality of what we’re feeling right now.

 

I learned from being awake in the depths of night to notice and let go of any thoughts or expectations I had about what I’d see or hear. And to look specifically for beauty. To befriend the night as much as I could. To recognize darkness can be intriguing and can illuminate what was formerly hidden….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Myth of Today: The Call Is Not to Enter the Dark Forest by Ourselves, But, by Ourselves, to Call Others

I’m sitting here, feeling my hands on the keyboard, noticing my breath is a little short and jumpy.  Anxious. Worried. A dark curtain is hanging out behind my right ear. And I notice a desire to do something to part that curtain; to change the situation of our world today, or at least bring some calm to myself, so the anxiety will explode into bits of nothing, or into the past to be studied like ancient history. So, I can feel the joy that deeply wants to be felt.

 

A friend calls on the phone. I take a deep breath and we talk, which lifts me out of the anxiety. A little mindfulness and the voice of friendship can do that. We all need that voice.

 

So much is changing. So much is threatened. And it’s difficult to see how we can influence a change for the better. But just as the voice of a friend helped lift me out of the grip of anxiety, joining with others, and feeling the yearning and the need to act, together, does the same. There might be fear there, that is true. But also light, hope. A sense of the future emerges, that there can be a future. That there can be joy and love in the future.

 

This is one way we dissolve anxiety. We see that it’s there, name it, and then do something to alleviate it. Worrying can deprive us of ourselves. Learning, planning, acting can give us the strength we need, so we feel we have strength and power. It is a kindness that we give ourselves, and kindness is so needed to change the world. Kindness to ourselves and others helps us part that curtain so we can see ourselves more clearly, with more perspective.

 

And getting a larger perspective is a second thing we can do. We can do that partly by taking walks in nature, studying mind-body disciplines like martial arts, yoga, and meditation, reading history, politics, science, literature, humor, etc.

 

I remember reading Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with A Thousand Faces. This is a powerful book to read and share with students and friends. It can open doors to widely divergent works of literature and religion that otherwise might be closed, such as the story of the Buddha to Bilbo Baggins. From Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo to Gilgamesh, the hero of the first story ever written. From Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars and Close Encounters.

 

Campbell’s book explicates the hero cycle, a pattern that heroic characters have possibly followed in their path to enlightenment, redemption, or saving lives. One part of that path is The Call to Adventure. The movie Star Wars begins with Luke Skywalker living with his aunt and uncle. He is enveloped in his normal world, knowing nothing of who he is and feeling distant from the battle taking place in the universe around him. He is asked by Obi Wan Kenobi to join in the quest to rescue Princess Leia. He refuses. At first.

 

Then he goes home to find it, and his aunt and uncle, burned. The struggle has become personal, and he is ready to heed the call. George Lucas used the hero cycle quite very deliberately in creating the movie….

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

***Photo is the Lion Gate of Mycenae, Greece.

A Happy Surprise

Last week, by chance, I noticed my name in a tweet. An article on Medium, titled “A Salute to Veracity,” written by Anthony Eichberger, included a list of the most exceptional pieces they’ve read on the platform. The list includes nine categories⎼ politics, race, gender & sexuality, disability, religion, intersectionality, wokeness, human behavior, and environmentalism. The author said, “these writers are all gifted when placing controversial issues into proper context with nuance and thoughtfulness.”

 

One of my political pieces, first published by The Good Men Project called “Countering the GOP Strategy of Undermining People’s Faith in Democracy,” was chosen as exceptional.

 

It is always wonderful to get positive feedback and to share good news with you, the readers and subscribers to my blog. I deeply appreciate that you take time to read my work. And hopefully, the posts have meaning for you. I write to say what I can, to help others when I can, in my own ways. Writing also helps me stay engaged and in touch with creativity. In this crazy, disturbing time, staying engaged and doing what we can politically and socially has never been more important. So, thank you.

Living with the Unknown in Ourselves

I was watching the Ken Burns documentary on Ernest Hemingway last night. In the second hour of the program, the narrator was describing the difficulties Hemingway had beginning his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. He had already published a critically acclaimed book of short stories, where each sentence was a work of art. Suddenly, he needed to shift to the length and breadth of detail a novel required. Hemingway told himself, write one true sentence. Then another and another. Which is what he did.

 

Hemingway was both a great artist surrounded by friends and family, as well as a solitary narcissist. There is both a loneliness and a luminosity to words. They can be used to mask as well as unmask, to torture or heal. We have to be totally alone in ourselves to write. Yet, words can fill us with a sense of connection and ecstasy. We might try to hold them to us as if they could warm our bodies with their heat. But when we do so, the words dissolve into air. It’s not the words themselves that warm us but the breath we give them as we speak and listen, and the paths to others they might reveal.

 

Two days ago, in the woods near the top of our hill, maybe 25 feet from a road, my wife and I came upon two circles in the earth. We had never seen these before. The bigger one was about 12 feet across, with a moss and stone foundation and one young oak tree growing inside it. Maybe it was once a silo. And the smaller circle, now a depression in the earth lined with rotted leaves and stones, was maybe once a well.

 

The more we looked, the more we found. There were stacks of old boards, maybe an old wall or roof. Further in the trees was a wood railing on an old porch attached to nothing and leading nowhere. It was like someone had built an entrance without knowing where it led. Even in a forest that we think we knew well, we were surprised. There were histories hidden here we had no knowledge of. What we didn’t know was way more prolific than what we did.

 

The night before we discovered the ruins, I had a dream. It started out understandably enough. I was outdoors at a party, a celebration, but no one was wearing a mask, not even me. I felt naked and more and more afraid. Everyone was acting as if there had never been or wasn’t now a pandemic raging in the land, or maybe they had somehow forgotten. Occasionally someone, usually a former student from when I taught secondary school, called out to me, inviting me to sit with them and talk. I waved and walked on, intent on getting out of there as quickly as I could. But I couldn’t. There were people everywhere.

 

Then everything changed. I was in a new dream, or the old one had transformed itself. I was watching a play, also outdoors. A young, attractive, strong looking woman came on stage. She looked Tibetan. The crowd heard her words, maybe the dream me also heard her. But me, the dreamer, did not. I heard no words, just saw her lips move.

 

Then she left the stage, to return wearing a huge mask….

 

To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Aging: Finding an Extra Set of Hands, or Added Muscle in Ourselves

Aging is a mystery we can’t solve no matter how much we might desire to do so. We just live it, if we’re lucky. Although it might not always feel so lucky.

 

But maybe, if we could hear the honest truth of how other people lived their aging, we might live our own more gracefully. Maybe. Or at least we would not feel isolated in ourselves.

 

So I’m now reading two very different books, Essays After Eighty by the American poet Laureate, Donald Hall, who lived 1928-2018, and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Expanded and Newly Translated, by David Hinton. Tu Fu lived from 712-770 C. E. and many consider him China’s greatest classical poet.

 

Hall’s writing feels very personal to me, partly because I took a creative writing class with him when I was in College. The class was engaging, challenging. At times afterwards, I contacted him to talk about my own writing or how to get published. And years later, he gave a talk at a nearby college and we reconnected. I was so surprised he remembered me.

 

We can hold such contradictory and frightening notions. We can both want to know, and yet, not know⎼ what will happen to us next week? Next year? When will we die? We can think of each decade as an actual thing, a door we pass through. “I’m thirty now…seventy, eighty, ninety.” But the door has only the solidity we give it. As Hidy Ochiai⎼ world renowned master and master teacher of the traditional Japanese martial arts, who is still teaching in his eighties and with whom I have studied for many years⎼ put it: “We’re not old. We’re just getting older.”

 

Hall says, “However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.” And as we age, we enter and deconstruct that alien universe.

 

“My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down…. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next.”

 

Maybe we don’t worry often about death, but we feel it more and more, somewhere behind us and getting closer. Sometimes, we just stop, lost in thought about what to do next or whether we have already done all we need to do. We wonder how well we will be able to walk, get around. How independent. In the U. S., independence, vulnerability or lack of control is one of our greatest fears.

 

Yet so many of us say we don’t feel old. Even in our seventies, we imagine we’re thirty. I notice it is more difficult now to get up after doing floor exercises. One reason I work out daily is to stay as young in body and mind as I can, to stay limber, healthy. The aches I feel afterward are almost pleasurable, a reminder I am here….

 

To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.