A Word About Words

and Story beyond stories...

‘Listen’ and ‘Begin’ are the first words that you see when you walk into the artist’s residence at our farm. They greet you from a hemlock beam high above a south-facing window overlooking the garden. Two words, simple really. And yet, a portal. For me and for many of our guests they are bullet points of a creative process that bears an uncanny resemblance to a contemplative one. And they serve as a reminder: To still yourself enough that the world may speak and once brimming, to overflow into your art - to give form to that which is asked.

This summer, artists, thinkers and justice seekers from around the country have found their way to this little opening in the trees to steep in silence, natural splendor, and orient their cycles of creation to the rhythm of life on the mountain. They rest, seek clarity, and summon courage to bring their unique visions of healing into the world. We call this little experiment the “Seeker’s Sabbatical”.

I believe deeply in the work of these people. We live in a precious and precarious moment, and it is asking a lot of humanity. If we are to create a lasting and beautiful habitation on this planet, we must confront the parts of us and our culture that no longer serve the living systems we’re an integral part of. Our well-being is inextricably linked to the health of our relationships - to each other and to the natural world. And we will learn how to be a sacred and coherent part only to the extent we can develop a sense of empathy for the web of those engagements. To light a spark of caring and connection, I believe creatives have a special role to play.

We’re at the halfway point in this first year of the experiment. Three seekers have come. Three more have yet to arrive. Each has their own story about what they hope to accomplish and each encounters something different. I’ve studied their processes with deep fascination, partly because I want to learn how to best leverage the abundance on this hilltop to support future creatives and their passions. But also because I want to learn how to be a braver creative myself. I wanted to know how they nurture and coax their creations to life because of the regret I feel about story after story that has arisen and then gone quiet in me, without ever finding form. I want to learn from them as Rumi implored “how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood”.

As you might have gathered in the silence which has arisen since my last post, I am far from a state of abandon when it comes to my singing. So when it became apparent in looking at our family calendar that there was an entire week when I’d be all alone on the farm, I knew immediately what I wanted: to take my seekerly-self to the silence of the cabin and do the hard work I was inviting others here to do - TO MAKE A THING - a personal, meaning-full and beautiful thing. Turns out “Listen” and “Begin” were the words I too needed to hear. And to live under.

“The things we attend to become our life.” — William James

I have a difficult relationship with words and the worlds they create in me. The stories I tell myself have this fascinating ability to shift the entirety of my emotional body, for better and worse, into whatever fantastical abstraction they can convince me of. And the beauty, truthfulness and coherence of these stories that I tell (or lack thereof) greatly impact my life and the quality of my relationships. Many of the stories that live in me, I’ve noticed, are about fear and loss. Abstract fear. Fear of my own making that leads me straight into the abyss. Aldous Huxley said it beautifully “Words can be good servants and terrible masters.” So I entered my week as a seeker with a couple of questions that I hoped could begin to heal my relationship to writing. Could I use my time to make the words more dutiful and less haunting? If I could get out from under the fear stories and write from the perspective of my un-storied self, what words were possible then?

Much and very little happened during my week. I experienced some beautiful moments apart from the elevator music of chatter running in the background of my life. I got better at being in my body in moments when mental flights of fancy were taking me far far away. I wrote (a very satisfying amount) without much concern that it be understood. Much of it was in poems, woven into stories about weather, and oceans, and a vivid embodied conversation I had with a Bergamot bush in our garden. Most of it was very personal and I’ll probably only share with Dina’s 101-year-old grandfather Irv, who loves that I write and who’ll perfectly understand the fascination with life that each word is trying to contain. The process was messy, hard, imperfect. Definitely unfinished. I still haven’t succeeded in doing away with the word ‘ineffable’. I wasn’t able to elegantly weave in the word ‘numinous’ in this story or ‘frisson,’ though they were both present this week. But the process of simply writing again felt life-giving and was one-hundred-percent better than the pattern I’m prone to, which is to listen, and listen and listen… and never to begin.

Aren’t we, humans, something like this? Aren’t we some fledgeling, unfinished blooming of the earth’s creative process? Of life just trying things out? When we are embodied in the actual world, when we create beauty in keeping with the harmony of creation, when we spend our precious life and energy on work that begets more life… That feels like sacred practice. And when I get to practice that act of creating with a family of other Seekers, it feels like flourishing.

The Seeker’s Sabbatical is designed to support the people who are making beautiful things that help us imagine this world and our place in it anew. We welcome those who listen deeply, have heard that call and are ready for a quiet and generous space to begin.

If you know of a creative for whom this might resonate, please help us spread the word!