How to Feel Time: Write

Wide Open Spaces – by Creator

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.
– Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, there were so many edges to jump off. I don’t know if it was the freedom from the clock, farm life or my own natural curiosity, but I wanted to explore and uncover and feel the world’s pulse, its intimacy and me in it. Looking back, I know now I wanted to “feel time,” slow it down, grasp it in my hands and write. Scratching out my first few words, echoes of what was to come, is what mattered.

As a kid, I loved snow…

Fifteen inches fell fast one year and I walked from the hen house roof to the barn roof. Snow drifts were so high cars were buried. China was just over there. When the weather was bad, I read my favorite frontiersman Davy Crockett and how he tracked animals. I learned to spot prints of critters that hopped, leaped or slinked during starry nights. Rabbits, squirrels, and on one frigid night, the mark of a cougar left an unmistakable trail. Following these tracks offered what poet Tony Hoagland may describe as “uncomplicated pleasures.” Just me attending to the weird cookie-cutter shapes in the snow and the great gladness of the outdoors.

No one could stop my sister and me from staying hours in our enchanted hideout, a lopsided igloo we built. Under its cold dome, we listened to the quiet of the shush-shush of snow melting. It was unhurried music to our ears, our surround sound, slow and syncopated. Drip—drip—dr–i–p. Time slowed down. We didn’t know then our brains count time lapses by pulses like listening to music. In the silence, solitude became pronounced, exaggerated. We felt time. The interwoven life of moments in solitude and nature fostered our creativity.

Decades later, I still like snow and all things beautiful.

Getting older makes me realize the only things desired are as Richard Rohr said “good, true, and beautiful.” For instance, to look at a rising snowbank calms my heart like a slow river. Listen to the hoot of an owl outside my bedroom window. Travel in time with a book without hurry. Kiss my grandchildren with great abandon. And music…escaping to my favorite chords is like bathing alone in a moonlight stream. But to write, ah-h-h, is to feel gilded moments of levitation, lifting off from the earth’s planes, flying alone.

Poet Jane Hirshfield said “…attentiveness only deepens what it regards..” To write is to “feel time”, to be awake to the world, to events around you. And by some wonderful act of grace, the world enlarges and encompasses your thoughts, your being. Breathing in as what the etymology of inspiration implies and your pathways as writers and artists magnanimously open to what is good, true, and beautiful. – Becky Breed

Writing and Creativity Exercise:

1. Turtles and other species enter into hibernation when their pond or lake is frozen over. They dig into the mud and use alternative methods of oxygenation to survive. For creatives, winter is a good time to go within and use the silence of solitude to restore our spirits observing the world.
2. Read or listen to the audible of Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte. In what ways does silence deepen your atttentiveness? Jot down a couple of ways.
3. How does cultivation of attentiveness encourage  embracing all things “good, true and beautiful”? Reflect upon what is “good, true and beautiful.”
4. With the medium of your choice, incubate an idea and then feel time creating something that is true and beautiful to you. Maybe even about snow.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

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