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 live.  Although we may sometimes talk about birthing a piece of writing, it is not always easy for us to believe in our ability to create truth’s life.

For courage in believing that I may be able to perform this artistry, I turn to the instructive words of Rainier Maria Rilke in his famous 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…

I know that at their best, poems and essays grow the embryonic truth from images and details.  Each time I face the blank page, though, I wonder if and when in the process of writing, my images will coalesce into such meaning making.  When it hasn’t happened, and I waver in my dedication to the images that have occurred to me, that my heart and mind have selected from my experience, I again rely on Rilke’s words and continue writing:

 … 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 critical voices in my head tell me no one will be interested in my writing because my experience is too trivial or too common, I move forward on the page trusting I can “win the confidence of what seems poor,” as Rilke said I must.  I 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.  I remember that writing takes on the mundane as well as the devastating, the daily as well as the once-in-a-lifetime. I remember that when we write about making and losing friends, moving, hearing children’s nightmares and stories, remembering parents and grandparents, planting gardens, exploring new places, and even walking to the same old store, we struggle to stay in touch with life’s meaning. In this struggle, we write as Rilke says to “outer standstill and inner movement.” When this happens, truth arrives.

“…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.”

From that hypnotic state, that lulling into reflection or lulling at least into lowering my guard comes my understanding of what the poet John Keats meant when he said he never perceived how any thing could be known for truth by consecutive reasoning. 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 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.

Writers and listeners alike, we are so very hungry for this moment of personal insight, whether it brings laughter, surprise or tears. We want to experience it again and again.  We want to be in the presence of the truth about 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 have chosen writing or have allowed it to choose us rededicate ourselves to valuing our observations and the details of our experiences.  May we coax our many dragons aside and write to sustain the truth.