Absolute and relative self

A star stays glowing and rotating up in the sky, an absolute whole, through relation: the relationship between gravity and pressure.

I’m a writer.

Do other writers forget that too? Sometimes?

“Writer” is a verb to me. My life revolves around it in a way that started at the root of memory and followed me here. I rotate around it; it moves me.

According to Etymonline.com, Thoreau said, “[Poetry] is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.”

Writing reveals itself to me. I think it comes for all of us. We choose to ignore it or not, or we have the time and space to pursue it or not. Writing is not just literacy and using words in a certain way. Yes, writing is functional, but it’s fundamentally communicative in much more expansive ways than that.

I feel that writing is part of the prism of becoming, rather than something you become. It helps you become, and what you become is never any one thing, anyway. Through it you can connect to yourself and others continuously.

Being a writer might mean allowing oneself to experience life through that veil of the “vaster receding thought”—not to erase it but to explore it with wonder and curiosity, recording your discoveries down like a scientist. When you saw that slant of light, what did you see? What did you feel? What does it mean about our world, and about ourselves? And then—what do you feel like after you’ve expressed it? Written?

In class the other week (I teach high school English), we showed students the 3 things that people say makes great literature: cultural importance, thematic relevance, and aesthetic beauty [you know, using words good]. We asked whether Of Mice and Men, in this context, stands as great literature. (I despise it, for the record, but I love what students make of it.) We asked who values literature and who decides it’s valuable. We ended the class with a process note asking students what makes their writing valuable.

I won’t count right this second, but something like 90% of students responded with something that included the words “expression” or “love.” And some didn’t answer that question at all, although they engaged with all the other ones on their paper. Because we value our own writing in a different way than that of “great literature.” We either do not learn to value it at all, or we value it completely differently.

I do truly think that if you write with expression and love, you will organically create something culturally important, thematically relevant, and aesthetically beautiful—but we so often approach this process from the other way around. Value first, self later.

And that is where I’m coming from as both a writer and a teacher. Expression and love. That is where I fall when it comes to valuing something, when it comes to separating the art from the artist, when it comes to whether or not you are allowing yourself to live through the hue of the vaster receding thought, to prioritize the slant of light.

To me, writing is a pause to engage with life as oneself.

It is a pause that is beautiful because it harmoniously reflects the nature of being.

It allows a moment of experience without as much input from external forces that may be prioritizing things differently than you and want you to get on board when you, right now, just can’t—or would rather not. Because autonomy is, you get to create. You get to listen to your own god.

When I pause and look up at the stars in the sky, I am struck by poetry.

When I breathe in the fresh air and I forget my stresses for just a moment, I am struck by poetry.

When I allow my thinking to flow from me and it feels like a direct link to my purpose in this life, it feels, in some way, “real.”

The pause is so important to writing. To becoming.

From Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance—

“There is massive knowledge and wisdom lying dormant in our exhausted and weary bodies and hearts” (96)

“We can always be open to dreaming into the process of rest” (97)

“I want our intentional rest to scream at oppression on a bullhorn, then emerge soft and full” (97)

“Let the space that dreaming asks for channel you back to your true self” (97)

As the cautionary tale The Substance tells us, we cannot avoid entropy. We must respect the balance. We use energy, and we must recover it. Whether it is our divine right, or our blessing, or our cosmic duty—that can be personal. But I damn well know it’s science.