Strange fire

“I come to you with strange fire. I make an offering of love.”
—The Indigo Girls

First came the horse, now comes the fire.

It's breaking my heart, wearing me down, making me wonder.

The more I hear this, the more I almost want to give up: "I loved the workshop, but my takeaway is that I'm not a writer."

Or "Everyone else in the group is clearly working on their craft; I'm just writing down whatever comes through. It feels good but I'm obviously not qualified to be here."

I want to scream. I do. Nobody believes me, because nobody but me is in a position to see what happens every single time: that every single person is ‘just writing whatever comes through.’ And yes, what they produce sounds exquisite, as though they planned it, or were at least prepared for it, or is indeed a master of their craft somehow.

It is not that. Not at all. The reason their writing sounds that way is because they're doing exactly what everyone else in the group is: opening the channel and letting the words flow onto the page in a deluge that momentarily drowns out the protective parts that would otherwise have them hold back.

Your piece sounds impossibly good to the group too. I promise you. When you’re in your heart, when you’re writing from your soul, they wish they could write like you. I wish I could write like you. Yes, you!

And even though I say this - even though you can see with your eyes that what you wrote is making us cry, making us think, making us cheer, making us fall over ourselves with praise - more often than not this is still the takeaway. “I don’t deserve to be here because I don’t write as well as everyone else.”

Oof. Oof oof oof. Goddamn what a gut punch that is. It hits a hard nugget in my solar plexus: one that signals something significant, something core. I’ll of course have to examine it in myself before I go yelling at the Big Wide World for it.

….

Well, OK, I’m going to go ahead and yell at the world now but I do promise I’m looking at it in me too. :)

We are so conditioned to compare ourselves to one another, to orient to how 'good' we are at something (or not), that we constantly undermine the liberatory power of expression. We meet praise with suspicion, or straight-up disbelief. We choke off connection; block the inflow of love.

Granted, there are a few dozen souls who recognize this for what it is, who have hung out, gone deeper, continued to trust and hold others as they negotiate the tricky threshold into this strange new place.

It is strange, come to think of it. It is scary. We’re not used to it. It’s hard to trust. This makes sense—in childhood, depending on the family, love often gets conflated with struggle and abuse and dysfunction and pain. Anyone who’s had even a day of therapy surely knows this.

Nor can we be “good” at anything in this world without having suffered for it. It doesn’t count as good unless we’ve surpassed someone else. Unless we, ya know, win.

So right, of course, how weird is it to be in a place where there is no comparison, no winning, and that much pure, abundant love to go around? How can someone new to this space possibly believe that, encountering it after an entire lifetime of the opposite?

This is bizarre new territory then, this medicine of expression.* It stirs things up, forces release, compels surrender. Of course folks are going to orient to the frameworks they already know, no matter how broken, how harmful. They’re safe because they are known.

That’s precisely the limbo we’re in right now in the world. What has always worked - or, rather, what has kept us glued stiffly together - is being churned up, revealed at last as no bueno. The new ways - ones that feel better, truer to who we are - are nevertheless unfamiliar.

I am not claiming that our way of writing together is in any way revolutionary, but I do think it carries a whiff of where we’re headed collectively. Occupying places of community, of generosity. No strings attached. Less efforting, more expressing from the heart. Being truthful. Being loved for it. Being loved, period.

It has nothing to do with the craft of writing. The craft, the medium, is just that: the delivery system for the medicine.

I also feel done with trying to describe this work in a way that makes sense to “everyone,” because no matter how I’ve tried that, folks still show up still believing it’s a place where some competency is necessary, or will at least be honed. Where they’ll either prove themselves, or improve. That some particular skill or talent makes them worthy or not. Again: this makes sense! This fire is strange, foreign. I’m going to keep it lit.

For now, in these paragraphs, I’m speaking not to everyone, but to you who will hear this; who see the strange fire and want to walk toward it. To whom this makes sense, or who are at least intrigued by the mystery. This is what we do here. We give birth to our souls by putting pen to paper.

*I’m writing myself to this realization, by the way. You’re watching the medicine at work.