Gathering sparks

How slowing down and paying attention can fuel your writing – and your life

Dear Writing friends,

This week, I’ve been gathering sparks. I've been making a conscious effort to slow down and pay attention to the small and the easily passed over. Gathering these sparks - of life, of creativity, of writing - is one of our guiding practices for this month of January here at Dear Writing.

January often feels like a month where I should be living out loud, buoyed up by the things I think I ought to do. For me, the noise of the world in January can be seductive. I'm pulled too easily towards the sequinned, the shiny, the big, the bold. In January, I can find myself setting unrealistic goals and hitting overwhelm by the second Monday.

Over the years, I’ve learned that I need January to be something quieter, a cocoon of a month that I can pull around me like a plump quilt. I need to seek out ways to turn inward, to bookend the business of my days with reading, writing in my notebook, walking, cups of chamomile tea.

In January, here in the North, the world is slowly emerging from midwinter, but the days are still long and often dark. When I ask myself what I really need at this time of year, the answer that comes back is to pay attention. I want time to peer into the shadowy places, to gather the sparks from the dying embers of the year that's just gone, to warm my hands on them, so that later – please let me sit here for a little while longer! – I can coax them into new flames.

I know that I'm not alone in this longing to look and listen and feel. You might feel it too.

And over the years, I've gathered a family around me. This family inhabits my bookshelves and little corners of my mind, urging me to keep looking longer and deeper, to seek stillness when everything is rushing and swirling.

One of my favourite members of this family is the poet Mary Oliver:

‘Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.’

- from ‘Sometimes.’ Red Bird, 2008. Beacon Press.

I go to her when I need a pep talk, which at this time of year is all the time. Oliver could be described as the Poet of Paying Attention. Her work enacts deep looking, listening, noticing, witnessing, being. Her poems seem to approach a kind of ecstasy in the process. They are invitations to know ourselves as embedded in the world through the creative act of slowing down and noticing:

‘Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.’

- from ‘Wild Geese.’ In Wild Geese: Selected Poems, 2004, Bloodaxe.

Like so many people, I cannot get enough of Mary Oliver. She makes me want to throw myself on my knees in the middle of a muddy Yorkshire field. She makes me want to write everything.

A decade ago, I began to describe my process of paying attention as Really Looking and Really Listening. By this I mean looking with our fingers, tongue, skin as well as our eyes, and listening with our eyes, heart, feet as well as our ears.

There is something that we experience, I think, when we look and listen deeply in this way, when we bring some thing or being - oak, moth, field, river, cup, candle, human - inside our own breath.

When I look like this, the space between me and what I’m looking at dissolves. Really Looking becomes a kind of loving.

Here’s Mark Doty on the experience of looking at a painting:

“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

― from Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

Writing, as Doty and Oliver know in their bones, can help us to do this kind of Really Looking and Really Listening.

And although I’ve used that word ‘love,’ this Really Looking is the opposite of what is often now called ‘romantic’ or ‘lyrical’.

It is animal. It is muscular. It is, in a world of screen shards and digital glimmers, real.

This year, I want - I need - more of this real.

What about you?

Writing Experiment

Using writing to pay attention

1.
Invite something into your attention - or allow it to invite you. It can be something that calls to you or something that you happen to notice. Try not to get caught up in choosing. This is an Experiment. You can do it as many times as you like with as many things or beings as you like.

Get up close to this something. Take some time to attune yourself to its attention. Breathe deeply into your body and engage all your senses.

2.
When you’re ready, write this something or being in words. Perhaps you want to think of this writing as a conversation with the thing. Perhaps you want to think of your words as a pencil or a paintbrush or a camera. What is the essence of this thing? What is its thinginess or beingness?

Write very precisely and specifically, using concrete language - that is, the qualities that you can know about it only directly, through your senses.

Get out of your head and your thinking. Use your words to touch, smell, taste this something or being in space and time.

At this point, you are not reaching for metaphors or ‘poetic language’. You are not moving into descriptions or explanations of your thoughts and emotions as you look at the something. You are seeking ways to ‘tell about’ it through colour, shape, texture, scent, sound, feeling. How does it throw light or shadow? How does it move? (Everything moves in some way, if you look long enough.) What does its voice sound like?

3.
Now, and only now, think about what this something is like. What is it like as shape, sound, texture, feeling? Does it evoke a memory of something? Again, be as clear and specific about these memories as possible.

Writing in spirals helps me to pay attention to my breath, the feeling of the paper, my hand and the ink moving.

More thoughts on writing as paying attention

The act of paying attention can be seen as a kind of mindfulness. I’ve written a short guide to writing and mindfulness here.

I think it’s also a quietly radical act. In a world where language often seems to be sliding into imprecision and ambiguity (perhaps even lies and post-truths), the act of paying attention – and then practising telling about it as precisely as we can – is more important than ever.

It also helps us to strengthen our writing. I know that not everyone reading Dear Writing is necessarily interested in polishing an end product. Some of you are primarily engaged with immersing yourself in the benefits of the process of writing.

However, I think this practice of paying attention is a good example of how writing for health and wellbeing and the craft of writing are so often intimately intertwined.

When I find the words that feel like the right ‘fit’ for an object, a feeling, a something, there is a sense of relief, of release, of something settling into place. It can help things to feel more manageable. It can help me to feel better.

How about you?

How did you find this Writing Experiment?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comments.

💌 P.S. As I press ‘send’ on this post,

Caitlin Cowan

at Pop Poetry has just published a fascinating article about athlete Diana Nyad’s ongoing relationship with Mary Oliver’s work.

Next Writing Together live workshop session: IGNITE

Wed Jan 17 at 6.30pm - 8pm (UK time)

Another year of Writing Together is about to unfold!

In this first workshop of the new calendar year, our theme will be: Ignite. We’ll explore the idea of togetherness and of small and tender actions we can take to cup our hands around the sparks and coax them into flame.

When you join us for a Writing Together paid subscriber session, you’ll find a gentle and restorative writing space where you’ll receive support and inspiration for your writing and reflection. Camera on or off, we’ll write together in response to writing rituals, suggestions and prompts and then have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve written and the process. The first part of the workshop is recorded for everyone so that you can catch up later if you can’t join us in ‘real time’. The second reflective part of the workshop is never recorded, in order to honour confidentiality.

I send out a new Zoom link a few hours before each month’s workshop session.

Thank you, dear Writing Friends, for your hearts, comments and encouragement, all of which fuel Dear Writing and help us to build this space together. I’m so grateful that you make time in your inbox for my words. 💌

With love,
Sophie x