A few years ago, I invented a way of coming to writing during times when I felt overwhelmed by my need to write, yet stuck in my ability to get anything of value on the page.  The exercise I invented ultimately helped me to create vignettes, essays, and poems from life experience when I had no idea what would come forward on the page or how to find my way into my own heart and thoughts.  I call the technique “Learning Words by Heart.” This exercise relies on organizing experience through the lens of randomly chosen vocabulary words.  Because I started with an unexpected and unfamiliar word, I found that I would easily and almost automatically associate the meaning with some event or situation in my life experience and arrive through writing at a truer understanding not only of the word’s definition but the state of my own feelings and heart.

 Here’s the exercise and how I do it:

I open the dictionary and close my eyes and point. When I open my eyes, if my finger points to a word I don’t know the definition of, I take that word for my exercise.  If I do know the definition, I close my eyes and point again until I find a word that I don’t know the meaning of.  Sometimes a word in my peripheral vision attracts my attention and, if I don’t know its meaning, I might use it instead of the one my finger is pointing to. Next, I read the definition.  I think of ways I might apply that word to my life.  When I have thought of an event or person or thing or situation I could describe in some way with that word, I title my page with the vocabulary word and start writing.

I keep writing and I don’t introduce the definition of the word until I feel that offering it will start to pull the threads of insight together.  At that time, I add in the definition and see where my freewrite takes me:

Starets

I have come to Northern California to accompany my husband who is working here.  Because I refuse to drive in the intense and speedy Bay Area traffic, I spend a lot of time walking and waiting for BART.  On my way to Berkeley, I transfer at the MacArthur station.  I walk downstairs and cross to the other side of the station and walk up another set of stairs to the opposite platform, the crepe soles of my shoes quiet on concrete.  On the platform, no one is talking. We are encapsulated, cradled really, by the noisy traffic of northern California, just yards away on all sides, trucks, cars, buses and vans rushing from one highway to the next.

I stand there listening.  I have been cradled by traffic my whole life.  I followed along behind the hyperactive mind and impulses of my mother.  I kept compulsive order like my father who often cleared our plates while food still rode on our forks.  At school, I was urged to “get involved,” “perform up to my ability” (which really meant beyond), “make friends,” and “be cooperative and conscientious.”  This was the traffic that loved me, held me, kept me, grew me, sung to me.

On some platform deep inside I realized I was the picture faintly seen for all the static on the television, the song discernible between the words of telephone conversations when wires crossed.

This morning, under a bright sky filled with pine branches and the boughs of willows, I opened the American Heritage Dictionary and with eyes closed, let my finger search for a word.  It landed on “starets,” which means “A respected spiritual advisor, often a monk or religious hermit in the Eastern Orthodox Church.”

Who was my starets?  Who could advise me in all this traffic?

Each time I write, I know that I must find out how within that traffic I can stand my ground, improve the reception, and hear my song on its own dedicated wire.  My writing is my starets.

As I reread this freewrite, done in reflection upon the contrast between things spiritual and traffic, I see that often freewrites become notes to ourselves about how writing deeply matters!

Sometimes re-working freewrites, we go beyond reminding ourselves about the importance of writing and examine other life territory.  That’s what happened with the following essay draft, which started as a freewrite inspired by a word new to me.  After I created the freewrite, I waited several weeks and when I looked back at the freewrite, I crafted a small tale:

Sederunt

It was a manicure and pedicure that I had made the appointment for, a treat at a salon that I’d never been to before.  I was early and the little building in Port Townsend, WA was locked.  At the appointed time, though, a cosmologist arrived and we walked inside.  She was the only one working that day, she explained, and she had had to leave to pick her son up at kindergarten and take him to the sitter’s.  As she began filing my fingernails, the phone rang.  She was also going to have to answer it, she told me, to take appointments for her absent co-workers.

The first time she got up, I felt irritated.  I had come to relax and having her stop and start my nails with the ringing of the phone jarred me.  I began to worry about how many times this would happen while I was there.  As she spoke on the phone, I averted my vexed gaze.  She took down appointment information, and I beheld Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier filling the sky.  They stood before me in white robes on the stage of Admiralty Bay’s blue waters.  The mountains looked like ancient Greek scholars imparting important lessons to disciples, like me, somewhere hidden at their feet.  Maybe observing the demands of someone else’s day would somehow be good for me, I thought.

When Amber returned from the phone and the appointment book, she started to tell me a story, full of difficulty, disappointment, hurt and bad luck.  Between numerous calls, she related how once in recovery, her alcoholic father left his job as an engineer and started leading mountain climbs for other recovering alcoholics to share a peak experiences that provided a high (pun intended by him, I would think) world without the use of chemicals.  He’d died two years before on a climb in Alaska trying to rescue a climber who’d fallen into a crevasse.

Amber’s mother, who had deserted Amber’s dad, brother and her when Amber was very young, had 20 years later started making love with Amber’s new husband, unbeknownst, of course, to Amber.  Feeling unhappy in her marriage, though without knowing why, Amber told her mother she was going to leave it, and her mother pleaded with her to stay.  This seemed very odd to Amber who thought her mother the very model of leaving behind what one didn’t like.  It was many years later, when her mother was living with Amber’s by then ex-husband, that she told Amber one drunken evening that she’d pleaded with her to stay in her marriage because she didn’t think she could keep this man without her daughter!

Now Amber was supporting her three small children with three jobs—cosmetologist, bartender, and caterer.

After finishing my fingernails, Amber had to straddle a very low bench to do the pedicure.  She moved the phone close to me and placed the appointment book on a chair beside her.  When the phone rang, I could pick up the receiver and hand it to her and without getting up from her bench, she could write down the information she needed.

And so we passed the afternoon, alone together in the salon.  Daylight was almost gone when I left.  My nails had a new life painted onto them, a life that came full of details about Amber’s life now painted onto to my mind and heart.

At home, I opened my dictionary and with my eyes closed, pointed.  The word my finger found was “sederunt,” and I had a name for what I’d done all afternoon.  The word means “a prolonged sitting (as for discussion)” according to Webster’s Ninth Collegiate.

To have my nails done by a woman who had to answer numerous phone calls made for a long sit, but Amber made for the sederunt in a town with more spaces between the buildings than my usual urban habitat, where there were more ways to see the world, a bigger view to appreciate it with, a way to fill the spaces between lives.  Instead of judging the experience as “horrible service” or “too time consuming,” I “camped out” with Amber. As the afternoon light faded, I took her story in and felt the jar of the telephone no longer an annoyance interrupting my quiet as she worked on my hands and feet, but an intrusion of others into our sederunt, others who knew nothing of the intimacy Amber had established telling me her story.

After the last phone call of the day, Amber filled me in on her brother and how he had survived their difficult childhood.  She told me that her brother had recently given up his job to write a science fiction novel.  What would he drag from the world he experienced into the one he was inventing?  How does one come to terms with events like this?  Maybe they don’t.  Maybe they use their story in writing as Amber’s brother might or maybe they use it to fill in the space between two people who are strangers to one another.  I’m happy the mountains became my sages, calling my attention to learning to sit as if for a discussion.  My fingers and nails are smooth now.  More importantly my heart is lighter because of the connection I made with a person who is working hard despite her losses.

Now it is your turn to try this exercise as a way of finding material and new perceptions.  Open your dictionary (different ones on different days if you wish).  Close your eyes.  Point your finger somewhere on the page.  Open your eyes and look at where your finger points on the page.  If you are pointing at a word you don’t know the meaning of, write this meaning down.  If you need to repeat the exercise to find a word you don’t know, do it now.

Next, jot down as many ideas as you have for using anecdotes to illustrate the way the notion inherent in your word’s definition operates in your life.  When one of these anecdotes inspires you, start to write.  Introduce the word and its meaning when it feels appropriate.

This is what I call knowing words by heart. You won’t forget the meanings of the new words and even better, you will have written interestingly and deeply and gotten yourself into some new ideas, creating pieces you might use as discrete essays or inside of other work.

It is fun finding your heart through words!