Reading and Writing

I have spent this past weekend on our annual Book Club cottage retreat.  Eight of us. How dear are these women.  While it rained all weekend, we filled the hours with the warmth and light of good long-standing friendship.  I feel truly blessed to share my life walk with these women. We have met monthly for almost three decades.  That is a lot of books.  A lot of stories.  A lot of laughter and tears. One of the women mentioned that she noticed that when she is in a gathering, there is nothing more uniting than shared stories.  While politics and religion may divide, story unites, builds community, bonds us together in the human story.  This proves to be true again and again.  Because of this book club, I read things I would not otherwise read.  My perspective broadens.  I become more layered, tolerant, interested, and interesting. 

Reading gets me writing.  I do not write what I know, I write to know.  Tapping my fingers on these keys is my melody.  My serenade. My lamentations. I once dreamed of playing a white grand piano under the dome of a glass solarium.  It was a numinous dream.  As my fingers found the white ivories, and then the black, as my feet found the pedals, as my eyes scanned the musical score, I filled the dome with classical beauty.   When I brought my dream to my training analyst, in Zurich, the first thing he asked me was whether I played piano.  I quickly replied that while I was in no way musical, the dream was clearly symbolic.  His translation was sobering.  He suggested an inflation, an unconscious belief that I was able to do things I was not trained, nor skilled, nor practiced in doing.  A hard translation that was both sobering and necessary.  I was at the trail head of my training to become a Jungian analyst, but I was at the time a novice, a rookie, a Jungian puppy.  My dream may have hinted at potential, but I needed to apply myself to the learning, the discipline, the study.  While I will never play the piano, I do tap the keys of my keyboard and the black and white font of my thoughts appear on the page.  While not numinous, I trust that what I write each week is useful to those who read these posts.  I know it is useful to me.

I started the discipline of this blog in September 2023.  Weekly.  That is some 40 posts.  I have gained subscribers, both free and to my surprise, paid subscribers.  The platform keeps track of the statistics and conveys to me my growing readership.  I am humbled and delighted.  That my need to know myself might offer something useful to others is quite a bonus.  Surely not everything I write is read or liked or even understood.  Of one book chosen last year by my book group, an award-winning book by an emergent Canadian author, Some Hellish, by Nicolos Herring, I was the only member who made it through the story.  I will admit, it was a laboured read.  I was hoping for a discussion of some of the most surprising and disturbing elements in the fiction, but it was not to be.  We spoke more about the inaccessibility of the story than of the story itself.   I think in our almost three decades together, there has only been one other book that no one read but me.  Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkota Estes. A book I selected.  I am still teased by my long-ago choice.  So, perhaps the scales come into balance and my esoteric choice meets its mate.  The unread stories.  I wonder if the book this year that failed my group was written more for the author than for his readership?  Maybe he lost sight of his readership, or like his main character, maybe he dove into the ocean so deep, encountered the crustaceans on the ocean floor, and failed to deliver his discoveries in a language or a story that was accessible to most.  Perhaps he was a bit too enamored of his own voice?  Perhaps the hard shell of his story crustacean needs the tools to crack it. This has to be one of the most profound challenges for the writer.  Striking a balance between writing to know and writing to be known. 

I am typing this blog right now because my Sunday night yoga class was cancelled by the teacher.  She was tired and spent from a long trip.  She chose self-care and asked for our understanding.  While disappointed, I was inspired by her example.  I have decided that I need a blog vacation.  A restorative pause. I will put this blog on vacation for the remainder of the summer.  I will return to it in the fall and seek your understanding in the meantime.  I want to have the space and time to listen more and speak less.  This seems to be an emergent theme for me.  I have spoken a lot here.  Now it is time to listen.  Deeply.  Listen to the story behind the story.  So, dear reader, I thank you for listening to me as I speak.  As I have spoken. I thank you for sharing this wordy space with me.  May your summertime be filled with nature and nurture.  I will be in the garden more.  I will be sitting quietly in my Baba Yaga hut.  I will be listening. 

See you in September.