Posted by When we approach writing as a means of expression, we believe, as with anything that arouses our interest, that it will become another tool at our service , like when we buy a pressure cooker to cook, a computer to work on, or a dog to to keep us company.
Our egocentric point of view makes us see the world this way: we use everything around us (including people) to satisfy our needs and desires. It does not occur to us to think that life could be any other way.
What writing has taught me
However, the world — reality — doesn’t work like that. It works how it wants , and not how it wants to us. At least that’s what writing (and also meditation) has taught me throughout my life. I believed that I used her to express myself, when in reality she has always been the one who has used me to express herself. Resisting that has led to countless crashes. Surrendering to that has led me to countless catharses. I trust my manipulation and desire for control less and less. I trust more and more what I let pass through me.
Last Saturday I accompanied thirteen women on a Writing and Meditation Mini Retreat. It was another example of how memoir writer for hire —or consciousness— uses our bodies, hearts and minds to open up to space. Sometimes, when I witness the spectacle of meaning making its way through texts, mediums, psychics, people capable of communicating with animals, what do I know… We are all a kind of “terminals” come to mind. of something immense that is at our disposal and, at the same time, uses us to manifest itself without end .
Through the pens of the thirteen brave women who attended the mini-retreat came experiences that touched us all with their beauty and by which each one, when reading them, was surprised. That did not come from the analytical mind, it did not even come from memory or the past (even if they were based on memories), but from opening to the experience of the present with the generous desire to also provide others with the key to enter it.
And for me, accompanying them when using the automatic writing technique , the following text came out:
Cariahappened. Slaughterhouse eggplants with sailor eyes, with freckles. Cocoon with skinny legs like the pinch of a beast. Poof. Pelmas. Caramba. How you look at me from the side without mercy. Wicker poverty with petals. With birds for a hat. Metal robins. Go away. Go away. Do not touch me. What the pages of perplexity provided with controversy look like. Arrogant shit. Why do not you go. Polygraphs of lies or constellations of golden firecrackers. Complexity.
This, which to my rational mind is total absurdity, nevertheless vibrates with meaning somewhere else. One of the participants told me, when I read it: “Book Marketing Services” And yes, perhaps there is something very angry in me or in the woman that I am, ancestrally angry, that manifested itself through my unconscious, and my unconscious must be nothing more than the database of the terminal connected to the central network.
The little windows that writing opens for us
We tend to despise these little windows that writing opens to other unknown dimensions of the mind , because they do not fit with our preconceived ideas about the world, about our objectives, about what has to be or should be. But if we let go, if we allow ourselves to be used by writing, it will give us truth and reality in its purest form. Not always understandable or easy to assimilate. But we can trust that it is what it is. Rage, anger, fear, beauty…
I wrote a novel and realized that I had always lived subordinated to others. I wrote a short story and got divorced. I wrote about my children and discovered their world. Writing has taken me to places I would not have entered even by crawling. And, at the same time, it has never let me down. I trust it more than myself or, rather, I trust it more than the patterns that so strongly condition my perception of reality.