Why do I write?

In trying to learn more about my personal connection to writing, I have been exploring the craft’s techniques and what writers have documented about their own experiences and found that I am at home amongst them. 

In letters from 1818 John Keats wrote “A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence.” He believed the poet has no real identity; they merge like shapeshifters in and out of their subject’s body. Around that same time, Emerson wrote in his journal that, “The poem is a confession of faith.” It is a pure translation of one’s perspective through thoughts and experiences. 

Mary Oliver believed that poets can’t, and should not, just write. We must “scrutinize the world intensely…” She went on to write in her handbook that, “If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers—has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.” (page 99). Oliver would often take walks with a small notebook and when inspiration sparked, she’d jot down her ideas. She found it was easy to work in an uninterrupted solitude. To her, the writing process was similar to dreaming. Oliver wrote, “The dreamer cannot enter that dream [their writing flow], precisely as it was unfolding, ever again because the line of thought is more than that: it is a line of feeling as well. The feeling is as real as the desk on which the poet is working. For the poem is not nailed together, or formed from one logical point to another, which might be retrievable—it is created through work in which the interweaving’s of craft, thought, and feeling are intricate, mysterious, and altogether ‘mortal’.” (page 117). 

When I was young, I could only write when intense emotions took over me- but this is not sustainable nor is it the state I wish to exist in. Resultingly all my middle to high school writing was ripped or burned or suffered some other unfair end. As I got deeper into spiritual teachings and my own practice, meditation, asanas, and journaling cracked open the world around me. Quiet observations of what sound, sights, and emotions float in the air outside my window or what get carried on the back of the small beetle became easier to tap into. It became the muse. 

I pay more attention to the media I am consuming and often the subject is mundane- the inner workings of one’s mind, the grounding routines, the love for the human experience in its mess, pain, and bountiful joy. My favorite shows and books became those which depict one growing into themselves, honoring the life they want to create, and shifting their perspective to align. Are these not mirrors for me? Is this not the same journey I have embarked on? So why did I cage myself to write only under immense heartbreak? Yes, it soothes the paralyzing sadness, but I have not been on that path in a long while, and I think it would be a dead end now anyways. 

I enjoy looking deeply into the different facets of the world and trying to find the words to fit the paradox that is the singleness of my own experience as we all live through it. I want to write in every waking moment. I don’t care if it is in clean handwriting or on a cafe napkin or if it is any good. I just want to document what is here and now when my heart feels moved by the most miniscule moment. Writing in itself is a meditative practice that must occur without judgment.

There are many poems and excerpts that I will not share, even if it is my best work. I am testing a new perspective that the process offers; I am testing truth and vulnerability and keeping my heart open to the lessons that surface. I am flowing between dream and reality and realizing they are one in the same. I write because it makes all the moving pieces slow down long enough for me to understand them. I write because it is how I love and how I exist here.