I desire to write

I am loving the book by Anne Lamott that I cited earlier this week. She is reverent, irreverent, fun. She speaks to writers and stimulates the desire in me to write (rather than just accumulate the accoutrements thereof--piles of paper, boxes of pens).

Write down a word that is beautiful to you
Stare at it
Let it seep
Add a word that cracks the beauty
Look at it and see inside
Hold it
in your ears
in your eyes
in your heart
until you know it differently
then add a word that heals it
add a word that shadows it
add a word that illuminates it

Yes, I desire to write. And little by little I learn and do.

Stripped bare

It's autumn and the leaves are falling/have fallen. Once again we can see the river from our hilltop perch.

When you write about your characters, we want to know all about their leaves and colors and growth. But we also want to know who they are when stripped of the surface show.
--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, New York: Anchor, 1995, pp. 82-83.

Stripped of image, frills, leaves, labels, security, resources....what's left of me under the surface?
I don't always like what I see, and that is a good challenge.

There are lots of things I need less of: food, anger, talking, clutter, stuff, ...
and some things I need more of: water, exercise, prayer, listening, writing.

Manfred MaxNeef makes an interesting distinction between needs and satisfiers--or false satisfiers. It raises questions: what do I really need? What do I accumulate for the wrong reasons? I would like to live more simply in many different ways.

You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear. Anne Lamott, p. 84

Sometimes I lose sight of the connectedness of all things. It is good to strip away the things that make it hard to see/experience/live a connected life--in which we are all one in the one Body of God.