Soul Work

“Soul” is not a thing, but a quality or dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.  Thomas More, Care of the Soul I’m in a soul searching group.

It’s disguised as a food optimizing, weight loss, slimming group.  But, really, it's a soul searching group.

Kind of a high-falutin' term for a weight loss group, you say?

Could be, but, I’m sticking to my terminology.

I’ll try to explain.

Soul work and truth work are close relatives. Writing and soul work are Siamese twins.  Over the last several years, I have been writing, commenting, observing on paper (or whatever this medium is) on subjects ranging from theology & spirituality, raising children, marriage, growing up in an Irish-Catholic New York City community with all the gifts and baggage that entails and bringing that with me to a suburb in Dallas.

And all the while ignoring the scale.  Refusing to look at the number when the mean nurse made me stand on the truth device for a doctor visit.  Hiding under big blouses until they were no longer big.  Then having to buy the next size, just to be decent.

I was ignoring the truth.  I read all sorts of ‘soulful’ subjects, like spirituality, mythology, literature, psychology.  But that was stuff that went on between the ears.  Soul work takes place in the body, in the real, tangible, hot, cold, freezing, stifling, bright, dreary, windy, rainy world where our bodies reside.

The ‘salvation of my soul’ was drummed into me courtesy of the Baltimore Catechism.  I thought it had to do with sins and bad thoughts.  I had no idea that it had anything to do with groceries.

When I first encountered the teaching that Catholicism was a ‘sensual’ religion, I was taken aback.  I was raised in a more ascetical version of the faith, which turns out to be not so kosher. The use of very ordinary elements of life raised to be vehicles of the holy: the bread and wine, the olive oil, the beeswax candles, the incense, the lighting, the kneeling and the standing, all have to do with body. They are the ‘smells and bells’ of Catholicism of old and of scary movies of Hollywood.  Body in the service of the sacred.  Body in the service of soul.

As a student, I studied theology.  When I was a new mother, I learned what theology meant.  Theology, body/soul/spirit work, happens when you care for someone.  When you change diapers, stay up all night, rock a baby to sleep, prepare meals, put off your own plans for the good of someone else, make sure they are healthy, safe, happy.  When you give yourself away without counting it as sacrifice.  And then, do it all again someday with elderly parents who once did all that for you.

You have to be conscious to do soul work.  Eating whatever was handy or tasty or filled a need, just for the moment, was not being conscious.  It was a form of oblivion.  Like drinking.  Or and other kind of addiction.

So, yes, I am doing soul work.  In the kitchen.  It’s as good a place as any.

Memoir, continued

An archeologist recently found a shoe that dates back to 5500 B.C.  Reading about it in the NYTimes, I couldn’t help but smile at the journalist who had to wonder who wore this shoe, what kind of life did he or she lead, what was their culture like, why was this item carefully filled with grass and set within a burial cave?  All these questions from a leather shoe with broken and repaired laces. Archeological references are apt when speaking of memoir.  A flash of memory, an old photo, a conversation around the dinner table, or a Thanksgiving family gathering, and voila! memoir is being articulated.

Some of us, though,  whose natural position is either pen in hand or fingers bent over a keyboard, take those nuggets, those snapshots of memory and imagination, and need to turn them into story.  We need to take the anecdotes, the characters, the situations, the culture and the specifics of history and find a thread of meaning, a connection, an overriding narrative to weave through our lives so we can perceive more of the whole, so we can argue against theories of randomness and anarchy in our own history.

It all ties together.  Processed through our filters, our language, our various talents, we create something new with memoir.  Not quite a transcript of history, but an interpretation of history, an annotated version, if you will, of a life.

But, it comes at a price.

A friend of mine, a writer who has produced some beautiful pieces of her life in a West Virginia coal mining community, wrote in answer to my question on the price of memoir: The short answer is that writing memoir was harder than anything I've ever done as well as more fulfilling. I was totally unprepared for the emotional toll it exacted because, after all, I wrote mostly happy memories. Didn't matter. It like to have killed me - and I'm not over-dramatizing this. Well, maybe a little..

After a few essays of the memoir variety of mine were published something happened to me.  I was nearly mute in writing.  I struggled for words.  I’d sit and try to write and so little would come, just notes and thoughts and threads that I couldn’t follow.  I thought I’d try my hand at fiction, so I would have a different kind of freedom, a different set of rules of structure and form and creativity.  Again, I stalled.

I think some part of me was shutting down, telling me that I had said too much, that I need to pull back, retreat.  I became rather reclusive.

I closed down much of my life, my contacts with people.  I pulled away, pulled in. Only recently, after three years, I am emerging from this retreat and stepping back into the world, finding my voice again.

When all is said and done, hopefully, memoir can be an exercise in forgiveness, in understanding, and in love.

What is the Price of Memoir?

I have a bookshelf full of how-to-write books:  Strunk & White, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Dorothea Brande, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera to quote Yul Brenner. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t remember reading an important caveat:  if you write a personal essay, a memoir, and it gets published and you win a plaque and get a lovely check, there is a price to pay.

Memoirs of a life lived in Happyville don’t often get published.  There needs to be conflict, confusion, battles, secrets, overcoming obstacles that still pop up every once in a while and punch you in the proverbial nose. And of course, there needs to be characters, otherwise known as real people, otherwise known as your parents, your brothers and sisters, your friends.  That is, the first people you loved and were loved by.  Family.

It would be the unusual family who cheers you on while you expose their faults.  Most families don’t like that so much.

We are in the tell-all, dashboard confessional, tabloid era of opening our lives for strangers to read.  Some argue that writing memoir is healing, liberating, or standing up for yourself against forces that oppressed or damaged you.  Some argue that in writing about the pain of your past you will find strength in claiming your story.  You will reveal yourself as a person of depth because of your suffering and survival. Your soul has heft, and therefore, you are wise.

Or maybe you just have hubris.

I have two published pieces out in the world that are memoir.  I felt I needed to write them, I felt that the depth of feeling I had sharpened my writing, I felt I had processed enough of the past to bring a mature perspective on things.  I gambled that I might feel further exiled from my family because of my decision to write these pieces, but some other need, some other ambition, was stronger than my hesitation.

Here I would like to open this blog up to a discussion:  What is the price a writer pays for memoir?

As a for instance, to get the discussion started, I became a mute writer, stuck in a limbo of stories going nowhere.  My success in getting those pieces published should have goaded me on to write more, but, adversely, I have written less.  I feel exposed and vulnerable and more keenly aware of pain I may have caused.  I suppose you call that regret.

There are out there, not quite written on stone, but I cannot take back words once uttered.

To end with another movie quote:

So shall it be written, so shall it be done--- Yul Brenner, the imperious.

You Can't Live There

I’m pretty certain you cannot live in the same place you write. Now, I don’t mean you cannot physically live in the house/ office/ coffee shop/ park bench, etc where you write, but that you cannot stay there if you have to also be, in your other time, a functioning human being.  If you go grocery shopping in the same 'space' you write, you will a difficult and touchy customer.

Writing requires some dropping down into that other place, the place that is messy and chaotic and full of feelings and observations and pain and humor and mud and desert and all that stuff that we cannot bring to the grocery store.

We probably shouldn’t bring it to the dinner table either and give more credence to the classic picture of the brooding alcoholic unwashed cranky writer who is a lousy companion.

So if you have other responsibilities in life and have to switch between several roles you have to learn how to drop down, stay long enough to come up with a story, a character, a sentence even, and then emerge from that place, like Persephone out of Hades, and interact like a normal human being.

I need quiet to write--- I prefer to have the house to myself and not have to chatter or check in with the other people---- but this is not always possible. If I want to produce something I have to have time to submerge into that writing space and root around in the dark for memories or characters or bits of conversation that can lead to a story. Sometimes I have to manage that when I don't have the house to myself, but I find that needs the cooperation of an understanding family who can tell by my expression that I am elsewhere and not available for chatter.

Naturally there are exceptional writers, such as Jane Austen, who managed to produce classic literature while balancing a writing box on her lap and exchanging witticisms with her companions.  But I am not Jane Austen.  And from what I gather, very few can manage that wonderful feat.

I imagine writers like Jane Austen have an ability to be in two places at once, while sitting in the parlor.  She must have been able to navigate between her writing self and her social self.  What a gift.  A rare gift, I should say.

But I'm pretty sure that if I was always in writer mode I'd turn into a curmudgeon and miss out on the lighter side of life. Not to mention getting groceries in for dinner.