The Writing Process

My sister asked me to describe my "process" for writing. I had never thought I had one. But on thinking about it, I decided to share these words, which I will also share here...

On this beautiful feast of Imbolc and Saint Brigid's Day, I am finally getting to reply to your thoughtful inquiry. It is hard to answer because I do not trust any process or formula for writers. Each must find their own way to the grail by entering the thickest, wildest, most pathless part of the forest.

For me it would be a sacrilege to "discipline" myself to sit at a regular hour and make myself write, for that would mean I depended on my own will, and my own mind. But poems flow from the divine Otheress, and She taps your heart in unexpected moments, usually between waking and sleeping, which is the space of meditation.

My poems, those that have any kind of energy at all, begin with the faintest impulse in the heart (not in the head) at the end of a meditation period, or in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., or just upon waking in the morning, the moment before the mind of yesterday falls back into the brain like a sack of ashes. It feels like a gentle flame, pre-cognitive and pre-verbal, just a compulsion that says, "Write this!" Then it forms itself into a few words, a phrase, and that is the first line. And then it springs from that seed.

A verse of the Veda declares, "In the beginning, the Lord created the universe through a stream of Sound" (Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi.) Which is to say, "In the beginning was the Word." Too bad we in the West have intellectualized the meaning of Logos, because as quantum physics shows us, the universe really is a condensation of waves in the vacuum, vibrations out of silence, it is all music, it is all sound. So poems begin in the heart-chakra (which in Sanskrit is called the "Anahatta" or "Unstruck Sound") as waves of silence imbued with love. And as you keep listening, the waves become words.

But then the work begins. Sometimes I will take that seed and turn it into something much longer, with a lot of work in it. But sometimes the best should be left as it falls, as it occasions, right out of the heart onto the page. Sometimes it is left as it is for a longtime, a year or more, then rediscovered and worked into a poem. Sometimes it is overworked and I wish I had held onto that first draft, which was the best. In the words of French poet, Paul Verlain, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

All I can finally say is that poetry comes from the breath of the Creator, which is his Holy Spirit, his creative Mother-principle, the Shekinah, or Goddess Shakti. I can attribute poetry to no other source.