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Awhile ago I fell asleep watching Berry Kubrick’s interview on Beauty, with John O’Donohue. At one point — in response to a question about what it might mean to live a grace-filled life — O’Donohue quotes Bill Stafford:
The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And the things you know before you hear them — those are you.
Those are why you are in the world.1
Oftentimes, I’ll read snippets of my journal entries to folks. My therapist, for example. I’d like to say it’s because I’m just that brave but really it’s because I’m afraid of wasting half the session skirting around what I’ve already gotten to in a more articulate, written manner, and may as well hit the nail on the head.
My writing is often a reflection of what I’m reading… and I’m reading a lot. So lately, even my diary is pretty quote-heavy. I want what I discover and love to stick. Sometimes someone will ask me what I think about something, and I’ll respond with a quote from an author I’ve read. I do this in general — at a show or in private conversation or whatever — because a simple question can elicit a network of 75 different authors and things they’ve said all stored in my brain. For better or worse (it’s both), being a systems thinker with a relatively high capacity for retaining random-ass takes on things that may or may not be relevant sometimes pays off.
It’s not my way of avoiding my own answer — which I eventually stumble into — but of rejoicing in the fact that someone has found language for the experience of being that resembles my own, and closely enough that I consider it borrowable.
This is what I mean by throwing sheets over — or giving bodies to — the ghosts that haunt us (which is how I have chosen to describe what I desire this publication to be).
I’m not trying to outsource agency or my own thinking on the altar of whomever I might be referencing. It’s more like paying attention to what leaps for joy in me when it recognizes what it knows before I hear it. It’s not a grasping but a recognition.
I see my own soul in these words, and sooner or later — after kneading the clay and pressing it against the contours of my own body — the things I know before I hear them yield an iteration that reads uniquely me.
Lately, Sue Monk Kidd’s words have been a Beautiful example of this kind of recognition. I devoured When The Heart Waits and Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which I read back-to-back this August, and felt my skin molt. She’s writing — over twenty years ago — the experiences I’ve been living for the past three years. Of dreams that compel her out of comfort. Of “rebellions” that are not rebellions, but obediences. Of words that are still usable but flipped upside down.
It happened the other day through Rob Bell’s 354 RobCast: This Guy Asks This Other Guy. I know I just wrote a post about his influence on my life last week. He speaks of recognizing the ways in which he is growing out of what he has always done. He started writing this fiction book called “Where’d You Park Your Spaceship” and it’s super far outside of his wheelhouse, but he’s been talking about these experiences of Jesus coming to him in the midst of the shift and saying, “‘Hey Rob, you’ve been telling my stories for thirty years. Good job — mad respect — but… do you want to be done? Because it’s getting awkward.’ He’s really funny [Jesus], and ten steps ahead — but no shame. He’s a kind of Love where everything you ever done or been? It all belongs. It’s all swallowed up in Love.”
It’s happening as I read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. As I read Heather Hamilton’s Returning To Eden. As I listen to Aubrey Marcus’s Internal Family Systems Masterclass with Richard Schwartz and as I read Schwartz’s No Bad Parts or digest Hillary McBride’s Holy Hurt Podcast.
To work on you is to work on your art. And vice versa. Sure, you can get narcissistic in there, but you can come out of the cave, too. The creative journey unfolds the same way life does — we all start out with someone else’s words before we find our own.
When I first started writing, I did so to the same lyrical structure as Adam Duritz in the Counting Crows song, Round Here. I have a middle-school journal with at least three different sets of lyrics that I can sing to the exact tune and tempo as that August & Everything After opener. I borrowed it so that I could learn to crawl, stand with a hand to steady my wobble on the side of a too-sharp coffee table, and eventually: walk.
I recognized a Beauty I wanted to emulate, echo, make my own. And I know when I hear it now, the way I heard it then. It invigorates and energizes, synchronizes, and — albeit slowly — helps me learn to trust my stride.
Barry Kubrick:
“You capitalize the ‘B’ in ‘Beautiful’ as one would capitalize the ‘G’ in ‘God'…
John O’Donohue:
“I do, because I believe it is that sublime kind of Presence. I believe that the experience of the Beautiful is like a homecoming to something in us that always knew it.”
Always grateful for Glimpses of homecoming.
Stafford, W., Merchant, P., & Wixon, V. (1998). Crossing unmarked snow. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11083