write a list…
The Blank Page can be the most tantalising thing…and the most frightening.
I sometimes find myself whispering to myself.
Today I whispered:
“Write a list”.
“Write a list of words…nouns…I want to write about if only I could.”
I began with the line “This much I know…” and every time the pen stopped, I repeated “and this much I know…” (sometimes morphing it to “and this much she knew”.
If you want to, you can also add “and the reason for this is…”
These are prompts to move me forward on the page. In editing mode, I often eliminate them. They are there just to get me started.
My list included ideas that I wanted to understand more fully:
Living a life of joyful practice
Moving forward under duress
Making decisions, not second guessing
All three concepts related to the story of Persphone and Demeter, one of my favourite myths and one I often find myself telling my clients at this time of liminality (see below).
So I decided to re-vision my very own version of the Persephone and Demeter myth.
It begins like this:
Once upon a time, a long long time ago and only yesterday, there was a beautiful young woman called Persephone, who grew up in what one can only call an enchanted Paradise. She lived on a small farm on the edge of a city with her mother, Demeter.
When I was writing my PhD dissertation, I found a beautiful book called “The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for our time, edited by Christine Downing (2013).
This myth speaks to us in many different ways, depending on our life cycle. It has been seen as an agricultural fertility cycle: while Demeter searched for her daughter Persephone “the land turned barren, animals and human beings alike lost interest in reproduction, and slowing the earth was dying” ( Gloria Fean Orenstein’s An Ecofeminist Perspective on the Demeter-Persephone Myth in Downing (2013).
My take is that I see this particular myth as a way of explaining the creative cycle …the different seasons of creative practice. In this case, there are two main seasons, one of joyful creativity and the other of rest and recoup, ready to seed the next project.
In Nicole Gulotta’s “Wild Words: Rituals, Routines and Rhythms for Braving the Writers Path” (2019), she writes about writing, provoked initially by Mary Oliver’s poem called Morning: “What more could I do with wild words?” A great provocation for all of us.
Gulotta sees the writer’s life as a gathering of many seasons, beginning with a planting of the story. Her question is “What story do you need to tell right now?” She also talks about the season of self-doubt. That is (for most of us) self evident, particularly now in 2020. I’m partial to her “season of liminal space” where “you’re neither here nor there but in between” (Chapter 7). I think this is where most of us are right now. In a COVID19 liminal space of creative practice. Doing it but not quite doing it.
Gulotta sees this liminal season as a gift, a time of letting go, providing time to think…a kind of winter. Richard Rohr sees liminal space as a way of understanding ourselves
Liminal space relativizes our perspective. When we embrace liminality, we choose hope over sleepwalking, denial, or despair. The world around us becomes again an enchanted universe, something we intuitively understood when we were young and somehow lost touch with as we grew older (https://cac.org/oneing-liminal-space-introduction/)
The word ‘enchanted’ always awakens something within me. Demeter and Persephone live an enchanted life, until it was time for Persephone to move underground once more. Metaphorically, so did Demeter, waiting for the seeds of spring to burst through the earth, to begin a new cycle. And that is why we are engaged in our project “Working Title: August Artists” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/AUGUSTARTISTS) a place to begin again…to record the list of ideas that are ready to burst forth.