Last week I was musing on finding my fire and I finished up by saying that my fire needs a little more tending, a little more fuel, perhaps a bit more air and by asking: A bit more air…what would that look like?
Seemingly it would look like A Walk Between Heaven and Earth (Burghild NinaHolzer) – one more book I need to add to my reading list. Jackee read from the book and her selection included the analogy of going for a walk. To paraphrase, it said that we don't walk knowing what we're going to see, so why would we set out to write expecting to know what we will say?
However we set out, what needs to be said will be said. We will write what needs to be written. I think this forms a central idea in the work of others I'm learning from right now. I'm thinking about Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones, just about anything by Nan Shepherd, and the encouragement from Jonathan Ward who leads our Creative Writing Outside group on the Cley Marshes in Norfolk and who repeatedly urges us into raw writing, following our instincts, and who having set out a path for us tells us to deviate interestingly from it.
Intellectually, I'm sure that most writers will 'get' the idea. Putting it into practice comes harder. That's why I love a good prompt. It's also why I keep that interesting deviations notion in mind.
On this occasion, the prompt was: what in you is waiting to be written?
I wandered back into someone else's story for a little while before I came back to that question. What is waiting in me to be written? My answer was:
What makes you think it's waiting? Consider that it is already being written in the secret corners of your journals and what it is waiting for is to be set free, to be released into the wild. Consider that perhaps, it is not so much waiting to be written as waiting to be read. Let it emerge. Go back – not to the beginning, but randomly. Trust the process, trust the synchronicity, trust serendipity. Open your own books at random. Keep the mysteries safe, and set them free.
Delve into your word-witchery, your spinning, your hoard. Write your poems. Talk about what you see, what you really see. Look closely, look deeply.
I thought more about that walk analogy. Not only do we set out not knowing what we will find, but the important thing is that very concept of 'setting out' or 'starting out'. We don't drop into a walk in the middle, we start from where we are. We have to walk our way into a walk.
So there it is, I have my permission to write my way into writing. Also, the memory-pictures of a walk do not hold the whole of the walk, but only the edited highlights, or the overall feeling, or sometimes even the emotion at the end of it. Likewise with writing there will be the boring bits to edit out. There will be the diversions. There will be the getting lost.
Oh but how many of the best discoveries on walks have come from the diversions? How many of the memory-pictures from down the years emerge from being lost. It isn't about taking the road less travelled, but about taking the road for the first time, because every time is a first time, you cannot walk the same road twice, not if you are really looking, really listening, really feeling.
The previous day a friend reminded me that I had spoken about wanting to walk the Norfolk Round, and that reminded me that I had also once had plans to walk the LOOP (the London Outer Orbital Path). I had once had other more grandiose notions, but these two I found I still wanted to do, and even in these restricted and uncertain times, these two feel within the realm of possible.
So in scribbling about what in me is waiting to be written it should not have surprised me that I kept circling back to the walking metaphor. Walking. Walk. I ask myself: Whatever happened to "hiker"?
Again, I answer me:
She needs new boots. Wide-fitting boots. Boots that don't scrunch her toes. But she still wants to walk. On days like today with sun in the sky and frost on the ground she is itching to walk, longing for that feeling of settling into stride. The solitude. The achievement. The adventure. The unexpectedness. So then, when?
A lot of my answers to my own questions simply raise more questions. This is why I journal. I get to talk to me. Interestingly, I didn't ask 'where', only 'when?' But the real question was 'how?'
I went on…
Walk the way you used to – and write the way you do now. Remember when you thought you wanted to be a travel writer? What was it you were really trying to do even then? What wereyou really interested in? It was never about the routes, and the facilities (or lack of them) along the way. It was always about the joy of discovering it.
Perhapsit isn't about walking the way I used to either, or the way I once thought I would. It is about walking the way I want to now. It is about recognising that the walking and the writing are partners, and that I know how unhappy they are when they are separated. It is time to re-unite them.
As I rambled on (ramble: a walking word if ever there was one) I kept hearing the injunction from Em Strang's poem Water of Ae not to wait. Quite specifically "don’t wait thinking you need better boots". I repeated that line to myself and turned it into my own words:
Don't wait for better boots. Yes, go find them, but do not wait. Walk anyway. Walk now. Wander. Stroll. Ramble! Walk differently.
I realised that I have been holding myself back by holding on to how I used to walk. I understood that if that is how I am meant to do it now, that's how it will unfold – but I am older now, and Ihave learned to be less comparative, less competitive, less concerned about the number of miles or how many hours or how remote or how difficult or how exotic.
I now know (what I always knew, but suffocated) that it is all about the path – not the route, the path, the way, the detail, the connection. It's about listening, about asking my soul or Spirit each time I set out: what do I need from the this walk, what am I meant to learn, to experience, to find?
More simply: where am I meant to go today?
Over the last few years, I have repeatedly tried to go back to my walking books – the books of routes and maps – and I have repeatedly stalled. Now I see that my resistance is because I kept going back with an out-dated mindset. I kept going back with my old 'check-list' mind, my do-them-all tick-them-off mindset. I am not that person anymore. My soul quite rightly kept saying "nah, you're alright, I'll leave it, thanks anyway".
The clarity is: I need to walk again, I need to walk more, but I need to walk differently.
I need to walk more, but less. More often, fewer miles. Only enough planning to be safe, more random to be excited by.
I am excited at the thought that I can go back to the walk-book shelf and pick a book at random. I can open the map box and pick one out with my eyes closed. Then I can plan my next adventure around that. I can plan it in finite detail, and then I can deviate interestingly. I can visit churches, or cow byres. I can sit in fields or on hillsides or city sidewalks or village greens. I can decide to stop half-way and take the short-cut home.
I can see a walk as raw material. Or not. I can see it as soul food. Or not. I can go looking for something specific and be not remotely upset if I on't find it. I can go wandering aimlessly. Long walks, short walks, but mostly walks that are only remotely pre-determined. I can treat walks like well-trained dogs. I can set out with and then let them off the lead, allow them their head and see where they lead me, knowing that they will come back to heel when called.
