Intimations of Imagination

As a creative person, I’m often asked how to increase our imaginative ability. One way is to learn to pay attention to moments when you’re surprised, startled, or captured by something. Perhaps an image, event or idea. A moment of beauty or repulsion. Such moments mean something is resonating in you. These are “intimations of imagination.” Intimation is the act of making something known. These moments are seeds of imaginative potential and carry tremendous energy.

Often we are too busy or distracted to attend them. A creative person needs to tune herself to catch these energies. Hence the pencil stub and bit of paper always in the pocket.

Here’s an example. During an acupuncture session, a vivid image flashed in my mind. A poem wanting to be. But, being a human porcupine, I couldn’t grab a pencil. Afterward, I considered jotting it down, but rush hour traffic was increasing by the minute. So I didn’t. That night, I was distracted by life’s unending necessaries. When I at last opened my notebook the next morning, the poem was gone. Oh, I still had the image, but it was as bland as egg whites. All the energy it carried had fled.

A week later, shortly after I went to bed, an image and a phrase came. So did the energy. But I was already late to bed. However, recalling the lost poem, I thought, this is my job as a creative person. And that job comes with irregular hours and starting bells that ring at odd times. So I stumbled into the kitchen and opened my notebook. A poem flurried onto the page. With work, that poem may be a good one. It contains a possible picture book story, too.

Joseph Campbell wrote, “the goal is to live with godlike composure on the divine rush of energy.” Writing is the same. If you show up for the intimations of your imagination, that rush of energy will do most of the work for you.

7:30 BELLS: Carillon of Revelation

The bells rang rang this week when I discovered the poet Mary Oliver. Stunned and filled and fed, I sat reading her New and Selected Poems, the collection that won the National Book Award. I’ve been thinking for some time of writing poetry more seriously, but my poems seemed too simple and narrative, not complex or abstract enough. Reading Mary Oliver was not only a revelation, but permission to be the poet I want to be.

This 7:30 BELLS series came from my solo trip to Italy in the late spring of 2012, where I was on fire to the bone and dashed out poem after poem. (more on that here). I came home determined to Vivere e Scrivere—to live and to write. When I read Oliver’s poem  SOMETIMES (in the collection RED BIRD), she stated that so beautifully and succinctly.

     “Instructions for living a life:

            Pay attention.

            Be astonished.

            Tell about it.”

That's  exactly how I want to live. You’ll notice Oliver does not add, “Have a multitude of readers, ” after "Tell about it."

So I will be writing more poems, telling about what astonishes me. Whether anyone ever reads them has nothing to do with living.

LORE OF THE BELL

Vivere e Scrivere

Go, Live, Write a Word Mess: One Writer's Grand Adventure

If you want to have a Grand Adventure, travel alone and leave your camera behind.

In May and June, I took a three week trip to Italy—fifteen days of it spent traveling alone. When first planning the trip, I had planned to travel most of the time with an acquaintance. She bagged out ten days before the trip—yes, ten days, you read that right. Fortunately, I had sensed the way the wind was blowing, and had made extensive backup plans to travel alone.

Certainly, I was nervous about traveling alone in a foreign country. But all my life I had dreamed of traveling to Italy and was not going to let fear stop me. As it turned out, traveling alone was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I came alive. I woke up.

In Florence, the museum that hosts Michelangelo’s great David doesn’t allow photography, preferring you to buy their inferior photos in the gift shop. I have to thank them, because putting away the camera started something amazing. Because I needed some way to express my powerful feelings on seeing this masterpiece, I stayed at the David for two hours writing streams of poetry. After that, I continued writing poetry for the rest of the trip.

I have tried to keep a journal many times—aren’t writers supposed to do that? But I always, always failed. I was intimidated by the perfect journals friends keep—pasted with pictures, quotes, and neat, neat, neat. Friends urged me to keep a journal on my Italy trip. I tried--I really did--but was too overwhelmed, busy, and exhausted to write in any coherent fashion about what was happening. Then I met the David and discovered that journaling in poetry—in images and bursts and metaphors—worked wonderfully for me.

This was different from recording, it was living. I would start a bit of a poem, switch to something else, go back to an old poem, write three lines, start something else—you get it. I freed myself from being neat and pretty and perfect and renamed my journal WORD MESS. Like a mess hall where lots of food is offered, and you plunk what you want on your plate, go back for seconds, and don’t worry too much about the napkins. And us a battered little spiral bound notebook instead of a leatherbound, gilt edge writer's journal.

I returned from Italy with fifteen rough poems to develop, two new ideas for books, and ideas for revising a book in progress. Italy cracked me open like an egg. I don’t think this would have happened if I had been travelling with someone.

So here are three truths I learned about traveling:
1. A journey is not measured by the number of miles traveled or by the number of masterpieces seen, but by its impact on your heart.
2. The intended destination is only the point of departure for the real journey.
3. No Grand Adventure ever ends in the heart.

Go. Live. Write.