BEING AN OPEN CHANNEL
MUCH ADO IS frequently made about writers and their rituals. Writing, so the stories go, takes total concentration, a mustering of all intellectual energies—that and more. Special pens. Special notebooks. The desk clear and in perfect order. The phones off. The family backed off or somehow corralled. Privacy, even sanctity, is demanded. The writing space becomes a sanctum sanctorum....
I don’t like to make such a big deal out of writing.
I like writing to be more portable and flexible. I like writing to be something that fits into cracks and crannies. I don’t like it to dominate my life. I like it to fill my life. There is a big difference. When writing dominates a life, relationships suffer—and, not coincidentally, so does the writing. When writing is about being shut off from the world in a room sequestered with our own important thoughts, we lose the flow of life, the flow of new ideas and input that can shape, improve, and inform that thought. It is a matter of balance. Yes, we need time and space to write, but we do not perhaps need as much time and as much space as we might think. Rather than being a private affair cordoned off from life as the rest of the world lives it, writing might profitably be seen as an activity best embedded in life, not divorced from it—of course such a view of writing smacks of heresy.
The phone just rang and on the line was my friend Martha Hamilton Snyder, a homeopath and channel. We talked about the place of “interruptions” in our life. We both tend to view interruptions as interventions, even corrections, in our trajectory.
“I can be doing a reading for someone,” Martha said, “have my dogs stage a fit and need some attention, say, ‘Just a minute. I’ll be right back,’ then deal with my dogs and come right back just fine.”
In fact, from my years of talking with Martha, I have often noticed she comes back with something more than “just fine.” She comes back with a fresh thought or insight gained in the moment she was “interrupted” in her work. The same saving dynamic seems to work in my own work.
This morning Martha’s “interruption” functioned for me as a correction: I was writing about the need to be casual in our writing, but I wasn’t talking about how to do that. Listening to Martha, I thought, “Ah. That’s the piece I wasn’t saying: ‘channeling.’”
When writing is perceived as channeling spiritual information rather than inventing intellectual information, writing becomes a more fluid process that we are no longer charged with self-consciously guarding. Instead, we are charged with being available to it. We can “plug in” to the flow of writing rather than thinking of it as a stream of energy we must generate from within ourself.
Our ego wants to say, “I am writing and I cannot be interrupted and pulled away from my thoughts.” The actual artistic reality, the experience of artists throughout time, is something far different and far more humble. As artists, we make ourselves available for thoughts to come through us. To the degree that we can set ego aside, we can create freely. We tune in to a stream of inspiration. We allow it to flow through us. We are an “open channel.”
“Channeling? Julia, that word is so . . .”
I know. I know and I do not care, because the word is artistically accurate. Many people have an aversion to channeling as a word and as a concept. It seems too “New Age” or too nebulous and airy-fairy. And yet, it is essentially a way of talking about the creative process that has been reiterated over and over by artists throughout the centuries. Listen a second:
“The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.”—Giacomo Puccini
“Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God.”—Johannes Brahms
“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” —Piet Mondrian
“I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit Himself accomplishes all through me.”—William Blake
It could be argued that the artists I am quoting come from earlier times, times when it was acceptable to attribute inspiration to “God.” I think acceptability has less to do with it than accuracy; these men are simply reporting their own experience. My contemporaries in the arts report much the same thing.
“I don’t play my music. It’s not my music. It’s God’s music. It’s God or the Great Spirit playing through me,” says Robert Jackson, an exquisite flute player. “Once I realized it wasn’t ‘my’ music, once I realized I was essentially a straw, I began to play very beautiful music—but it is not ‘mine.’ It’s God’s.”
Although we seldom talk about it in these terms, writing is a means of prayer. It connects us to the invisible world. It gives us a gate or a conduit for the other world to talk to us whether we call it the subconscious, the unconscious, the superconscious, the imagination, or the Muse. Writing gives us a place to welcome more than the rational. It opens the door to inspiration. It opens the door to God or, if you would, to “Good Orderly Direction.” Writing is a spiritual housekeeper. Writing sets things straight, giving us a sense of our true priorities.
No matter how secular it may appear, writing is actually a spiritual tool. We undertake it solo, and, not to be too facile with puns, it is worth noting that that word does have the word “soul” embedded in it. Moving alone onto the page, we often find ourselves companioned by higher forces, by a stream of insights and inspirations that seem somehow “other” than our routine thinking.
Artists throughout the centuries have noticed this higher dimension and called it “God.” It doesn’t matter what you call it. The point is that writing allows you to contact it. Whether you think of it as “God” or “higher forces,” as “inspiration” or as contact with your own “higher self” doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you can access a source of information and guidance, both creative and mundane, that will serve you.
Viewed this way—as a form of contact with something larger than ourselves—writing does not remain an ego-centered activity we are doing by our brilliant selves. It does not remain something that must be protected from life. It becomes, instead, a part of life, a cooperative pas de deux rather than a star turn.
The temptation to make our writing “mine,” particularly when it’s going well, is an understandable human impulse. It is, in a sense, the impulse to hoard. Rather than stay in the process of creating, we get attached to some particular creation. We think, “Wow. This is a real jewel, and I made it.”
“This is the best piece of writing I have done in twenty years. I am really proud of it,” I recently wrote David about a novella. As I wrote the words, a little internal buzzer sounded: Watch out ... It’s all very well for me to think the work is good. It is good but whether it is “mine” is a very different question. I know that if I tell the truth about what I experienced, I did have the experience of receiving this work, not creating it. I was the listener, not the speaker. I was, as Piet Mondrian put it, in the position of being “essentially a channel.”
I wrote a series of letters between a husband and a wife separated by war. I say, “I wrote,” but that is not really my experience of what happened. My experience is that I was chosen as a channel to view and write down a very real relationship between two people who were fully formed without my having to do anything in the way of invention. They had their own voices, opinions, pasts. I saw their house, met their children. I knew what the bathrooms and bedrooms looked like, what the driveway was like, what the backyard looked like. I “knew.” I did not invent. I did not “make up.” I simply wrote down what was shown to me. When the piece was finished, my ego kicked in.
The ego hates being a “channel”—or whatever other nonoffensive word you can find for it. The ego wants to take credit—but the ego never wants to take “blame.” The ego wants to have it both ways: to receive the work effortlessly and then take the full glory for having “thought it all up” instead of “taking it all down.”
It is possible to write out of the ego. It is possible, but it is also painful and exhausting. Back in my drinking days, I used to strain to be brilliant, to write the best, the most amazing, most dazzling.... Is it any wonder that chemical additives seemed like a good idea, like the secret hidden advantage I just might need?
Once I stopped drinking, I found all attempts to be a “great” writer or even a “good” writer to be both exhausting and somehow beside the point. I began to sense that writing was about something larger than “career.” I began to sense that writing was about writing itself. What I needed to do was simply write and not worry so much about judging it. But how?
I was told by screenwriters Jerry Ayres and Diana Gould, and by nonfiction writer Maurice Zolotow, to post a little sign by my desk that said something like, “OK, Universe. You take care of the quality. I’ll take care of the quantity.”
Good advice, all, but my ego bridled at this new humility, wondering if this meant I had “no standards.” As I told them, I “had my reservations.” Nonetheless, I tried their advice and my writing freed up immediately. Some days the writing seemed good to me. Other days it seemed less good. But I was writing regularly and with relative ease.
I came to the humbling conclusion that over time I wrote pretty much the same level all the time, a few peaks and a few valleys but overall: just Julia. I began to think of myself less as “author, author” and more as a word processor. I began to be more willing to let “it,” whatever “it” was, write through me. I began to write more quickly. My ego was less invested. Not coincidentally, my career began to lift off.
And so it is, nearly twenty years later, that I find myself passing on the advice that gave me so much freedom: let something, or somebody, or writing itself write through you. Step aside and let the creativity or the Great Creator or, as my sister calls it, the Great Author, do its work through you. In other words, cooperate, don’t seek to coopt the power that can enter the world through your hand.
On the days when I drop the rock, on the days when I get over myself, I write freely and happily. My writer’s life is a loose garment. It’s my baggy Chinese silk pajamas. It’s a life where I—and my brainchildren—are allowed to come as they are. Since I’m not invested in looking like a “real” writer or in acting like a “real” writer, I am freed up to have a real life. Since it isn’t about concentrating on how smart I am and how brilliant I need to be, since it’s now about listening to what is trying to speak through me, I can trust that the flow of writing is always there, always available, just like electricity at the flick of a switch.
This means I can turn my writing off long enough to deal with a family member or friend and that I can flick it back on again. I can put my Muse on hold if something important comes up that must be dealt with. I can lead a life in which my writing is a full partner but not a domineering and jealous spouse. I can have my writing and outside loves and interests. I can allow those loves and interests to feed my work. I can let the world into my work as an active ingredient and not as something that must be held at bay “while I work.”
If writing is about the play of ideas, that word “play” must be given more than lip service. Writing has to have some “play” in it like a bridge cable. Writing has to have some “play” in it, like a jump rope. Writing has to have some “play” in it, like the “play” of light across a field when the sky is dappled with clouds. Writing, in other words, must be large enough, loose enough, relaxed enough to contain all the multiplicity of a full life.
Martha, adroit at standing aside to receive information from other realms, often talks to me about the paradox of becoming ourselves through forgetting ourselves. The goal, as she sees it, is to allow our individual self to become subsumed by the larger Self working through us.
“If we really get in the exact moment, if we really just try to remember that the only reality is love, then we can stop worrying about results and just do what we do,” Martha says. She herself exemplifies this advice, moving among multiple worlds with ease and grace.
(I think of it as stretching a piece of material so that it becomes so sheer we can see through it.)
When we are willing to become gossamer, to allow the fabric of our own personality to expand and stretch to take in what we can apprehend through fully listening to inspiration, we become both more creative and less invested in the authorship of what we create. Often, we have an experience of awe as we feel what we are creating being born “through” us. The term “brainchildren” becomes more real to us as we experience our creations as entities with lives and agendas of their own. Rather than the “author” of a piece of work, we often experience ourselves as the “midwife” of a piece of work. It is born through us just as our children come through us but are possessed of lives and destinies of their own.
In a sense, our creativity is none of our business. It is a given, not something to be aspired to. It is not an invention of our ego. It is, instead, a natural function of our soul. We are intended to breathe and to live. We are intended to listen and create. We do not need special pens. We do not need special rooms or even special times. What we do need is the intention to allow creativity to create through us. When we open ourselves to something or someone greater than ourselves working through us, we paradoxically open ourselves to our own greatest selves.
BEING AN OPEN CHANNEL
Initiation Tool
For the use of this tool, begin by nudging the door of your mind an inch or two farther open. The tool you are about to try requires a spirit of open-mindedness and scientific inquiry. This is one of my favorite writing tools, one that might be called guided writing or even channeled writing. You may want to think of this as calling on the Muse. You might consider it a time to involve higher forces. You might, on the other hand, prefer to think of it in more Jungian terms: contacting the self.
You may want to use music, incense, sage, or a quiet, rhythmic drum track to help you open up. On the other hand, I have found that the process is really so simple that we do not need to make much ritualized rigamarole around it. If you have been writing Morning Pages, then you have already trained your censor to stand aside and let you enter deeper realms. The trick of this tool is the trick of many children’s games: “Let’s pretend.” Pretend that you are opening to higher realms and, like as not, you will discover that you have.
For this tool, I prefer initially to use a question-and-answer format. Set pen to page and ask a question on which you need advice. There are no wrong or stupid questions, and over time you will learn how to phrase your questions most effectively for you. For example:
Q. What to do about Daniel?
Next listen for advice and write down what you hear.
A. Encourage Daniel, tell him he’s on the right track.
Your questions can and should be about anything and everything. You can pursue a line of questioning with greater and greater specificity so that you arrive at some of the root issues you are dealing with.
Q. Does she love me?
A. The issue here lies with your loving yourself.
Q. Yes, but I would feel happier if I knew her true feelings.
A. You must take some direct, concrete, and loving actions on your own behalf.
Q. I want her to nurture me. How can I get her to do that?
A. You must open the door to receiving nurturing by nurturing yourself.
Do not be surprised if your guidance feels stubborn, hardheaded, and practical. You may find yourself the possessor of some previously unacknowledged “tough love” wisdom that you can use in your own behalf. In this regard, your answers to your questions will probably surprise you. Answers very often seem simpler and wiser than our normal thinking. Answers may suggest unorthodox previously un-thought-of solutions. It is my experience and that of my students—that the advice is worth trying out.
This is a tool you may use frequently once you become comfortable with it. Many students use it to “drop down the well” for quick guidance and stress relief in work situations. Others cite shifts of focus in career, in relationships, and, of course, in their writing.
Allow yourself to Q. and A. in half-hour sessions initially. Do not be surprised if a great deal of sound advice seems to have been waiting to be tapped into!
