My good friend Jacquelyn Vincenta is a novelist and essayist with a penetrating sensibility. She was traveling in Lithuania, about to begin her novel, The Lake and the Lost Girl, when the landscape and people of Lithuania called to her strongly, and she began writing about the presence of where she was. The following email conversation happened between us in the spring of 2011.
Jacquelyn: My days in Lithuania are winding down. Three months of travel drawing to a close and my mind has started to turn homeward.
I have a question for you in relation to your own experiences. Does it make any sense that while I have been here I have felt reluctant to let down some guard to fully engage my imagination and heart and write? It has been so strange. I feel I have soaked up and written down notes and notes, letters, and journal pages. I have photographed, watched, listened, and all in all been present. If I was on a mission of experiential quest—my soul and senses gathering what bits they can, in spite of my own lumbering, shadowy interior ghosts—I feel I have been successful. But the processing has been put off, the resistance to it huge, and I don’t understand why.
Perhaps you have thoughts on this.
Mark: Oh yes, I have experienced this sort of cross-purpose. Perhaps you’re not supposed to process all this yet. Perhaps you’re being asked to take in more. I find that when I push, nothing happens, and so I need to keep taking things in, to stay in conversation with life, and when the time is right—things flow very easily. I encourage you to not see the shift as some failing on your part but more the appearance of unexpected currents in a river as you ride down it. Our intentions while necessary are only guesses. Our challenge is to respond to the landscape we find ourselves in once the map blows away.
In terms of resistance, I find that I often try to mentally process or synthesize material when the only true way to access the already-put-together-whole is through the heart. And so, I must let my heart focus on whatever detail it can’t let go of, follow that detail, be in conversation with it, and write from there.
We’re often held hostage by our own design of what we hope to write and how we hope to write it, when the soul will speak what and when it wants. A deep part of the writer’s call is to drop our designs and follow what we see and hear—in real time.
The story of how a book has come to me—and is still coming to me—bears sharing. In my late twenties, I had a vision to write a book called Spiritual Ecology, based on exploring dynamics of the plant world as metaphors for our life of being. I began with enthusiasm and gathered so much. In the midst of this, I discovered a great deal about self-pollinating and cross-pollinating plants. I was intrigued to learn that cross-pollinating plants are known in the world of botany as “out-crossers.” But I couldn’t find what self-pollinating plants were called and so went on a long search, which took me to unexpected places.
One day, lost in the stacks of the SUNY–Albany library (this was before digital archives), I found quite remarkably that self-pollinating plants are known as “selfers.” I immediately knew that this compelling analogy, between selfers and out-crossers, was the basis for an entire book. But what of my Spiritual Ecology book waiting for my return?
I wound up leaving that book under construction and for eight months feverishly explored this one analogy, which kept unraveling and opening up into another book that I finished, called While We Are Blossoms. I still have Spiritual Ecology in mid-creation all these years later, and I hope to return to it. For a long time, I thought I was neglecting it but came to realize that each book has its own gestation, timing, and labor. And who knows, perhaps the whole purpose of Spiritual Ecology was to lead me to While We Are Blossoms.
So, I encourage you not to resist the shift but to go with it. At the same time, I also encourage you to meet whatever inner resistance you are feeling to this material by opening your heart to its many details and staying in conversation there.
I leave you with a recent poem, called “Loosening.” Trust your voice. Trust your muse. Trust the ways-you-are-not-yet-versed-in, which all this is calling you to meet. The reward for doing things well is not that we get to keep doing those same things well, but that we are invited to meet new things in new ways.
Loosening
On the plane, I woke with a start and
spilled water on my journal. The pages
curled. The words blurred. And last week,
it happened again. I hung up the phone
and tipped the cup. It seeped under the
blotter on my desk, softening all my lists
and numbers. And yesterday, in the
thunderstorm, when the sky was spilling,
I thought I heard a whisper. This morning,
I brought my plate and cup down the stairs
carefully, our dog by my side, when I caught
Buddha smiling in the mirror, floating like
someone waking after a hundred years.
Of course, I’ve been annoyed by all this
spilling. But I think it’s telling me
that I’m ready.
Jacquelyn: The level of specificity, synchronicity, and bounty in the Universe’s interaction with me over the last three months is unbelievable. The way I have been swept along in this journey, as if there was in fact some plan, not my own, that was drawn up somewhere that I can’t see. The currents, yes, are the perfect metaphor, and they have not only been powerful but so harmonious with each other. The spiritual path has completely flooded the production path I had in mind.
Of course, I hoped to see, to remain open, to be in fact more creative in this situation, away from everything at home, longing for the sort of break that can allow patterns to shift. But I did expect to follow, more or less, the intellectualized plan I had in mind.
I saw the breaking away, the journeying, and the time here as a situation that might allow some openings in my heart, in my stuck way of experiencing things. I could never have dreamt that Life would be so prolific with its messages, lamps, anonymous hands, and voices along the way.
Even the brokenness and grief I kept facing internally, facing the Nothingness and Unground of Life in Vilnius without a buffer, gave way to an intensity that kept leading me to meditation, to walking, to action, to writing.
But the writing has been from eye to hand to page. I have felt almost afraid of wandering off the path of detail. It has helped me feel attached to my days, my hours, my world, in spite of the lingering notion that I was alone in a strange land. Honestly, I have not been able to hold to my map. You are right, it has blown away. It’s been astounding how much more intimate the alternative journey has been.
Yesterday, on my walk, I suddenly came upon a five-hundred-year-old Franciscan church with its massive doors open, candles burning, and one woman praying. I paused, for I too do something like pray because I am never quite balanced these days. I walked on and attended a chamber music concert given by four sisters in an old building downtown. At the last minute, in walked one of the Franciscan monks from that church, prayer beads on his belt. He shuffled to the seat beside me as if assigned and sat down. His presence was peaceful. We both sat still through the intermission, though I thought I might leave. The girls continued and at length finished, then sang a song without instruments—an old melancholy Lithuanian ballad that felt like it was rending my heart.
I meditate nightly with my own prayer beads, and here the beads somehow walked into the concert with the monk. So I carried the song, I carried the monk, back through the dark streets, wrote notes in my apartment, where I stopped trying to think. I looked at my hands, not wanting to disturb the moment, and floated in the dark with my mala beads. They have now gone with me up to the dream workshop on the Baltic coast, where I washed them in the sea, and then to the countryside where I washed them in the river and tied linen thread to them.
But because I am someone without much of a past regarding myth, religion, or ritual, I am taking each step carefully: watching, listening, walking more. Every day has been like this. It probably looks like ease, vacation, play, but it feels like work that requires constant attention and energy.
Whether it is ego wanting to hold to some plan or project, or my fear of the future, or my fear of living a life without definition, or whatever comprises that in me which worries about what I do and do not write, it is undeniable that I gave up my usual resistance to the unknown and to other ways of knowing during this time here.
I have literally been living as if every day is a shamanic journey. I have no idea yet what this means in terms of the writing. But in the way you have trusted what speaks to you, I find myself with no other choice but to do the same. I am sure that I would not trade this weird, difficult journey for five hundred pages to edit at home. And yet, I have been drawn to turn to writing in a way that I have not since I was twenty.
Mark: What you share here is a profound affirmation that you are being led into the poetry of being in which life through its vital specificity reaches out to love us and wrestle us to live more deeply in the world. This is a thousand times more life-giving than the efforts, no matter how noble, to willfully extract poetry out of nothing. I have found that the greatest single evolvement in my own creativity these past five years has been to have more faith in the innate order and structure of things-as-they-are. And so, I’ve been working at letting go of my need to create an architecture and structure for books and simply work more completely at discovering and inhabiting the divine structure that is everywhere, if we can clear our minds and hearts to perceive it. Then, as you are feeling now, it’s all a matter of entering what-is and taking heart-notes. This requires another level of trust. Now I look for ways to enter this new, old place where I have never been, eager to see what it has to teach me.
I find that when I push, nothing happens, and so I need to keep taking things in, to stay in conversation with life, and when the time is right—things flow very easily.
An Invitation into the Mystery of Travel
• In conversation with a friend or loved one, ask them to tell a story of travel, sharing what they had hoped for, what they had planned for, what actually happened, and how they were changed by this journey.
• Later, in your journal, write a parable or story about a journey that changed the one on the journey.