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 knew the prompt in advance, or are indeed masters 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, hear with your ears 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 evaluate how ‘good’ we are at something (or not), that we constantly undermine the liberatory power of expression. By meeting praise with suspicion, or straight-up disbelief, we choke off connection; block the inflow of love.

Of course, there are you few dozen souls who recognize what we’re up to in our circle for what it is (channeling the truth, loving on one another for having done so), who have hung out, gone deeper, continued to trust and to hold others as they negotiate the tricky threshold into this strange new place. What had you stay? Because come to think of it…

It is strange.

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 little therapy surely knows this.

Nor can we be “good” at anything, goes our conditioning, without having suffered for it. Or, 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, no-strings-attached love to go around? How can someone new to this space possibly believe that, encountering it after an entire lifetime of the opposite?

It is bizarre new territory then, this medicine of expression.* It stirs things up, forces release, compels surrender. Of course we’re going to habitually orient to the frameworks we already know, no matter how broken, how harmful.

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 - all of this comparison and competition and beating ourselves senseless to meet certain standards - is being churned up, revealed as no bueno. Even so, the new ways - ones that are more heart-led, 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: toward 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 simply that: a delivery system for the medicine.

Maybe this is why the name Soul Writing got scuppered. People were (are!) getting too hung up on the writing part to be able to receive the Soul medicine this work provides.

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. Who are willing to believe that all we’re doing here is giving life to some larger awareness by putting pen to paper, and supporting one another in this brave act.

It is healing, it is magic. We are here.

I won’t give up then, and I hope you won’t either.

This fire is strange, foreign. I’m going to keep it lit.

What about you?

Do you find yourself doing work that’s dismantling harmful paradigms, even if we don’t quite know what is going to replace them yet?How is this bizarre calling manifesting itself through you these days? What challenges are you encountering? What’s (for lack of a better term) “working?” Please write me or post in the comments.

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