The following article about trusting our need to write was first published in Writing It Real on December 25, 2003.  As this year draws to a close, it seems timely again to remember that as artists, we must overcome  whatever lack of courage  we harbor and meet the world’s sadness as well as its joy with our art. We must write knowing that our humanity requires this. We have all in the last few days read the work of skilled poets who  have written in the aftermath of the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut (“Rock Me Mercy” by Yusef Komunyakaa is one) or listened to performances of music and poetry inspired by the tragedy (Author Jan Phillips posted her song and lyrics, “For Newtown“). Though the work of some has gotten finished way more quickly than we might finish our own, we must not refrain from our own writing because we are awed by, even envious of, the writing of others.  As writers, now more than ever, we must cultivate work dear to our hearts on whatever subjects and add our voices to the song we sing when we care, when we lament, when we wish for nothing more than to grow as a people. Here are my words of nine years ago.

I recently came across the following quote from German philosopher Karl Jaspers whose work influenced theology and psychology: Truth, he wrote, “only appears in time as a reality-through-communication. Abstracted from communication, truth hardens into an unreality.” For those of us who write from personal experience, this means that our words supply the necessary blood, tissues, oxygen and water for the truth to come to life. Although we often talk about birthing a piece of writing, it is not always easy for us to believe in our ability to do so. To gain the confidence that we will be able to perform this artistry, we can turn to the instructive words of Rainier Maria Rilke in his well-loved Letters to a Young Poet (as translated by M.D. Herter Norton in 1934):

…let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience….

…trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge…

Poems, essays and stories grow through images and details. Each time we face the blank page, though, we might wonder if and when in the process of writing, the images we find will coalesce into meaning making. We may waver in our dedication to the images that have occurred to us, that our hearts and minds selected from our experience. When we are in danger of giving up, we might again rely on Rilke’s words:

… have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them… Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

When your inner critic tells you that no one will be interested in your writing because your experience and perceptions are too trivial, too common, or you are not up to creating literature as great as that which has moved you, trust that by continuing to write you can “win the confidence of what seems poor,” as Rilke said. Stay with the simple, the mundane and oft unnoticed detail—the way a child’s hair lifts in the wind, the ripple of a stone thrown in water, the snail shell found in a pair of little boy’s pants. Remember that writing takes on the mundane and the daily and transforms it that we may cope with devastation when we must, migratory impressions of the divine when they come, and joy, too, when it abounds. Writing about making and losing friends, moving, hearing children’s nightmares and stories, remembering parents and grandparents, planting gardens, exploring new places, and even walking around the same old store, you are recording a struggle to stay in touch with life’s meaning, writing as Rilke instructs toward “outer standstill and inner movement.”

That is when truth arrives. Other poets, too, share insight for all writers. “It takes awhile, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains at the end of the field,” Mary Sarton wrote in a 1974 New York Times article, “but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse again with my hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part.”

The poet John Keats meant  someting like this, I think, when he said he was “certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” The state of trusting nature, details and images without imposing on them leads to what another poet, Edward Hirsch, calls “a deeply unantagonized part of mind…a concentrated fluidity of psychic energy…a highly focused alteration of consciousness.”

Whatever we call this moment between writer and self, between self and writing, and ultimately between writer and reader, and whatever we say it feels like, it is where truth becomes live; it is the scared moment of “communicability.” It is where we feel connected to ourselves, to each other and to the something larger, the Encompassing, as Karl Jaspers called it.

We must remember our hunger for this moment of personal insight, whether that moment brings laughter, surprise or tears. We must want to experience it again and again by writing our way toward it, no matter how long it takes to craft our exploration. We must want to be in the presence of the truths that will show us what  it feels like to be human. As this year draws to a close and we think about the next, may those of us who write rededicate ourselves to valuing our observations and the details of our experiences. May we push away the dragons that would convince us we can’t continue on our path, and may we write to sustain truth so we can authentically connect to our own deepest selves and to the deepest selves in others.