Intimate immensity

Writing to restore ourselves to ourselves, one another and the earth

My death

Make me a coffin of willow
and bait it with snails
to catch my soul.

Let me grow all winter
down by the river.
Boil the white boles

of my body
for eight or nine hours
and, when I’m ready,

strip me and polish me
until I shine again.
Cleave me along the grain,

make a cricket bat of my thigh
and a spoon of my tongue.
Twist the rods of my bones

just so and I can be useful
as a bicycle basket
or a fishing creel,

or perhaps I’ll carry
fruit or coal or hang
beneath a red balloon,

sail out on my next journey
over fields and rivers,
become the air, the trees.

‘My death’ won the Elmet Prize in 2009 and was included in my pamphlet, Refugee (Salt Modern Voices, No.12), 2012.

I don’t really know why, all the way back in the summer of 2009, I wrote a poem in which I imagined what would happen to me after my death.

Where do poems begin? I imagine them forming over years and years in the deepest layers of my body and then slowly, very slowly, surfacing through my skin.

I remember that, just before writing this poem, I’d read that the shells of sea snails had been found in the excavations of ancient graves across the world, in amongst the bones of people who had lived thousands of years ago in France, Kenya, Ireland, Mexico. The spiral shells are thought to have been placed with the dead as sacred symbols of rebirth.

But it’s the last stanza of my poem that strikes me now. It makes me think about my Dad’s name written on a piece of paper and hung beneath a bell, sailing out, becoming air and trees, as I shared in a post here last week. Perhaps our bodies know things long before our minds can even begin to comprehend them. In fact, I am certain they do.

In this poem, written fifteen years ago, I also see very clearly my yearning to connect with the more-than-human world. One of my earliest memories, as a very small child, is kneeling under a window with curtains blowing around me, elbows resting on the window ledge, watching the shapes carved by the wind in a ripening cornfield. Was this my bedroom window? Were there fields beyond the bottom of our garden? I think there must have been.

Later, in another house, I remember nights heavy with summer heat, when I would lie awake, longing to go out into the darkness, feel the cool of the grass beneath my feet, look at the stars.

Writing became, very early on, a doorway I could step through into that darkness, a way to touch something beyond myself that says: Yes, you belong in the world.

Gaston Bachelard uses the term ‘intimate immensity’ to describe the process through which he believed: ‘Poets will help us to discover within ourselves such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space’. ¹ He translates from Rilke’s Poéme (1924): 

‘Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:
If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,
Invest it with inner space, this space
That has its being in you.’

and:

‘O, I, who long to grow, 
I look outside myself, and the tree inside me grows.’²

This is another way, I think, of talking about paying close attention, but it’s an embodied kind of attention, in which we ‘invest’ or project our bodily feelings into an object in the world outside of us and, almost simultaneously, sense (or introject) its reciprocal beingness within ourselves. Over the last two decades, neuroscience has become fascinated with the study of this process of sensual empathy, which may possibly be linked to mirror neurons.

However, writers know instinctively that when the inner world of our feelings and creativity touches the outer world of trees, stars, rocks, rivers, we remember that we are merged with all of the earth: its plants, animals, landscapes; its past, present and future.

Here are Mary Oliver’s wild geese, beloved of so many of us, ‘over and over announcing your place in the family of things.’

And here is what philosopher Glen Albrecht calls the feeling of eutierria, ‘a positive feeling of oneness with the Earth and its life forces, where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated, and a deep sense of peace and connectedness pervades consciousness.’ ³

Writing can help us to remember that we are held in this intricate web of belonging.

Writing Invitation

I invite you to take your notebook outside, if this is available to you, into the street or garden or park or wherever it is that you happen to find yourself.

If you need to be inside, you can do this in just the same way with whatever comes into your awareness.

1.
Find some living being that catches your attention: plant, animal, pebble, water, earth… Whatever calls to you. (Don’t overthink it.) Introduce yourself to this being. Talk to it. Give it your complete attention. Take it into your full awareness.

You may want to close your eyes and sense into its aliveness. You may keep your eyes open and experiment with seeing from the inside of you. Open your being to its being. Notice how it makes you feel. Notice any tiny movements inside you or around you, real or imagined.

2.
Now describe it as if you were drawing it from life. Write what you see, smell, touch, feel, hear, taste. Use concrete detail. Write its shape, its shadow, its colour, its texture. Sense into its being with your own senses.

3.
Next, imagine how this beautiful being would speak to you, if you could hear its voice. (Perhaps you can.) What would it say? What messages would it have for you? Write this too.

You could write a dialogue down the page.

Sophie: Good morning, sycamore.
Sycamore: Good morning, Sophie. I’m sending love into your roots. Can you feel it?
Sophie: No… Um. Wait. Yes, perhaps I can, when I stand very still… like this…
Sycamore: It’s good to do this sometimes…

Find out where the dialogue takes you…

What happens when you allow yourself to move gently into sensual empathy – and then dialogue – with the beingness of the world around you?

4.
The next step is to imagine as if you have stepped inside this being, that you are fully inhabiting its form. Write what you see, hear, taste, smell in this new form.

If it feels comfortable for you, please do come and share your reflections in the comments. I’d love to hear.

Would you like to explore writing practices that can help you to pay close attention, to live your relationship with the world around you? Would you like to root your writing more deeply in your felt experience?

Restorative Writing Season 1: Core Practices offers a supportive space for you to develop your creative confidence and write what you want or need to write.

Paid members receive:

• ⚡️The Restorative Writing toolkit and resources, designed to help you to get the most out of the materials and your writing.

• ✎ A syllabus of seven ‘classes,’ each consisting of a short video and a structured writing ‘experiment’ or prompt.

• 🌼 Three Writing Together live sessions on Zoom (with partial recordings) + a special Midsummer Writing Together Zoom celebration on 22 June.

• ✨ Community space where you can share your experiences, questions and reflections (and some of your writing, if you so choose, but there is absolutely no expectation of this).

You can expect to:

• Find out more about the practice of restorative writing and establish a creative writing practice that restores your energy, your creativity and your belief in your writing and your self.

• Learn creative ways to rest deeply.

• Gain new knowledge about what really works for you and your writing and how to contine to nurture your practice in the weeks and months to come.

• Become a more self-compassionate and constructive reader of yourself on the page. This can often lead to new insights and understandings about your life and experience, as well as your creative process.

• Find supportive community. You don’t have to do this alone. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no pressure to join in with the ‘group’ parts or share any of your writing.
  
  

With love,
Sophie x

🗓
Upcoming timetable for Restorative Writing Season 1: Core Practices
Mark your calendars!

✎ Monday 6 May:
Launch of Season 1 - Access to your Restorative Writing Toolkit and Class 1

✎ Friday 10 May: Class 2

🌸 Saturday 11 May 4-5pm (UK summertime):
Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 17 May: Class 3

🌼 Wednesday 22 May 7-8pm (UK Summertime):
Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 24 May: Class 4
✎ Friday 31 May: Class 5
✎ Friday 7 June: Class 6

🌸 Sunday 9 June: 4-5pm Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 14 June: Class 7

☀️ Sat 22 June 4-5pm: Celebratory creative solstice sharing of writing and/or reflection. No requirement to read your own work out loud. Come and celebrate this community and what you’ve achieved.

1. Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. (1994 Edition). Transl. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. p.200.

2. Rilke, Poéme, dated June 1924. Translated from the German into French by Claude Vigée. Published in Les Lettres, (4) 14, 15, 16:13.

3. Albrecht, Glenn A.. Earth Emotions (pp. 167-168). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.