Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes, two skillful writers and past contributors to Writing It Real (be sure to click on their names to read their distinguished bios), have written a manuscript aimed at helping writers encourage and pay attention to their writing in the midst of commitments that squelch the meditative state required to make emotional associations that foster writing. This week, we post a double issue in which Brenda and Holly share the Preface, Table of Contents and first chapter of their new manuscript, complete with helpful exercises to focus and sustain your writing. 

Most exciting, the two authors are requesting that Writing It Real subscribers provide feedback about how their manuscript is working for its readers.

The article starts with a letter from Brenda to all of you as readers of the authors’ sample chapters. In the letter, she poses questions they would very much like answered by first readers. You can share your answers to the questions with the authors on our blog article discussion.

It is rare to find out what well-published authors’ concerns are as they circulate new work. And it is perhaps even more rare to be in the position of helping those who are writing to help us!

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A Letter from Brenda

Dear Writing It Real readers:

Thank you so much for taking part in our writing process for The Pen and The Bell: Making Room for Writing in a Crowded World. Holly Hughes and I have been working on this book for about three years, and we’re now delighted to have your eyes on it as well! 

Holly and I began our collaboration by writing letters to one another, exploring how contemplative practices — such as meditation, yoga, mindful walking, conscious eating — are linked to our writing practices. By working in the letter form, our writing took on a spontaneity and intimacy that allowed us to find unexpected images and stories that could then be transformed into instructional material for our readers. This draft is the result of many, many revisions to those initial letters, as we continually sought to refine our voices and structure the book in a way that would be as accessible and enjoyable as possible.

The Pen and The Bell includes contemplative practice suggestions and writing prompts, ideally offering you ways to:

·  create physical and mental space for writing

·    heighten awareness as a foundation for writing

·    use the ancient art of Lectio Divina (sacred reading) as a practice for writing

·    practice writing that articulates the concrete, tactile, sensory world

·    take risks in writing

·    explore personal spiritual traditions in writing

·    practice gratitude through writing

·    invigorate writing through attention to travel, animals, food, and your body

·    prepare for writing through ritual

·    write alone and in community

Holly and I are very interested to know your response to the Preface and first chapter of The Pen and the Bell. Here are some questions we have (but also feel free to comment on anything you notice):

Do you normally read the Preface to books? Does this Preface entice you to read further? If not, what would you like to see in a Preface?

Does the Table of Contents intrigue you? Is there anything you would do differently in the chapter titles?

Do the two voices work together in Chapter One? Do the first stories make you want to read further?

Are the stories relevant to your own experience as a writer?

Would you do the exercises we provide within the chapter? Is there anything you would change about the exercises?

Would you seek out the suggested readings at the end of the chapter?

Thank you again for taking the time to participate in this exciting part of our writing process!

Sincerely,

Brenda Miller

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The Pen and The Bell: Making Room to Write in a Crowded World

By Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes

Preface

A certain day became a presence to me; there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light: a being. And before it started to descend from the height of noon, it leaned over and struck my shoulder as if with the flat of a sword, granting me honor and a task. The day’s blow rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can. — Denise Levertov, “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”

Denise Levertov’s poem describes a state of mind many of us would love to achieve in our daily lives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to feel that each day we’re granted an “honor and a task,” and each day to know that we can easily do this work — with pleasure, focus, and joy? For those of us who love to write — or think we might love to write if we could simply find the time to do it — this “honor and task” could be sitting down with our senses and memories wide open, our pens and notebooks and computers at the ready to transcribe the world as accurately and as beautifully as we can.

This book, The Pen and the Bell, is about how to carve that space for writing in a world crowded with so many distractions. This book is about how many of us long to be “a bell awakened,” and yet how difficult that state can be to achieve in the face of our massive “to do” lists. It’s about being able to gain access to your deeper self in the work-a-day world, and to bring forth this authentic self in our writing.

The “Pen” enables us to write; the “Bell” enables us to stop and settle down for the time it takes to write. In this book, we provide you with stories and readings and writing prompts that address both sides of that equation. We offer many suggestions for everyday contemplative practices and writing — some of which take only a few minutes — and we give you snippets of readings that illustrate both processes. Through our stories, we hope to guide you in finding the elusive “still point” in your own busy lives, and we offer you many ways to articulate what you hear once the clamor ceases.

We have come to understand that both contemplation and writing do not necessarily need to happen in special, quiet rooms, in sanctified spaces; rather, they happen in the Volkswagen repair shop, at the Farmer’s Market, at PetSmart. In this book, you will hear our individual voices speaking side by side as we describe our own failings as well as our triumphs, and we share our own struggles with making time for both contemplation and writing in a world filled with a thousand interruptions.

We invite you to read this book in whatever ways work for you. You can read it from beginning to end, noticing the way our conversation unfolds along with the seasons and the vicissitudes of life. Or you can dip into it at random, drawn by whatever topic captures your eye. We hope that through this book, you will find yourself whispering I can, I can, I can when you next sit down to write.

Holly Hughes and Brenda Miller

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The Pen and The Bell: Table of Contents

Part One: The Practices: Sitting, Walking, Reading, and Writing

Chapter One: Sitting Down and Waking Up: Contemplative Practice to Enhance Your Powers of Observation

Chapter Two: Contemplative Reading: Using Your Reading to Enhance Your Writing

Chapter Three: In Training: Preparing Yourself for Writing

Chapter Four: Practice, Practice, Practice

Chapter Five: Walking Out into the World: Contemplation as an Active Practice

Chapter Six: In Transition: Using the Moments in Between for Your Writing

 

Part Two: Discovering Your Essential Material

Chapter Seven: Reviving Your Spiritual Traditions in Your Writing

Chapter Eight: On Sustenance: Food as Fodder for Your Writing

Chapter Nine: On Gratitude: How to Express Thankfulness in Your Writing

Chapter Ten: On Unfamiliar Ground: Travel as an Active Contemplative Practice

Chapter Eleven: Bringing Your Animal Companions into Your Writing

Chapter Twelve: Focusing on the Body in Your Writing

 

Part Three: The Larger Meaning of Writing

Chapter Thirteen: On Mortality: How to Transform Grief in Your Writing

Chapter Fourteen: Allowing Space in Your Writing and Your Life

Chapter Fifteen: On Solitude: Looking Inward

Chapter Sixteen: On Community: Looking Outward

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Chapter One

Sitting Down and Waking Up: Contemplative Practice to Enhance Your Powers of Observation

Except for paying attention, what else is continual prayer?

— Samuel Green, The Grace of Necessity

From Brenda — A Call to Attention A long time ago, before I even knew how to be a writer, I attended a writer’s workshop with Terry Tempest Williams in Missoula, Montana. As we entered the room one by one, we sat ourselves in a small circle, nodding shyly to one another as we waited for our teacher to arrive. When Terry breezed into the room, wafting a scent of sage, she immediately pulled from her bag a clay whistle in the shape of a turtle. She blew into the whistle three times — three quick sharp blasts that cut through our nervousness, our wish to be elsewhere. At that moment, before Terry had even said a word, we had learned something: how to be really here, right now, ready to learn, ready to write.

I remember nothing else of that workshop: not what we discussed, not what we wrote. I’m sure it was exciting, and I’m sure I came away with some concrete tools to use from then on. But what I do remember is Terry sitting next to me in the circle, her long skirt brushing her calves. I remember her presence, the way she shifted from being somewhere else, busy and hurried, and then being fully here, in that room, the whistling object in her hand.

Now, eons later, I’ve learned that becoming truly present is both the hardest and the most necessary thing I need to do — in both life and in writing.

In my small home, I try to keep my upstairs attic loft reserved for reading, writing, and sometimes — when I can remember do it — meditation. My dog, Abbe, often joins me there and make her nest in the blanket next to me, digging with her paws until the blanket’s messy enough to be comfortable. She flops down with a human-like sigh. Only when she is settled do I settle, adjusting myself on the cushion before ringing my little bell. And to do so, I have to take up the only implement handy: a pen. Abbe has gnawed the bell’s wooden striker beyond recognition, so all I have is a pen — an ordinary Bic ballpoint — to tap against the bell and begin my few minutes of sitting meditation. When I touch it against the curved lip of the brass bowl, a beautiful, clear tone issues forth.

It’s a call to attention — to the attentive stance necessary for writing.

Upstairs can sometimes feel like a different world altogether, removed from the quiet bedlam that’s ongoing downstairs: all the email, the mail, the newspaper, the television, the blogs I simply must read, the student papers, the to-do list. All of them clamor like toddlers for constant attention, though my attention is not really needed there, not every moment of the day. My attention is more acutely needed here, upstairs.

When life gets busy, I sometimes don’t make it up here at all. I often don’t realize it until I feel myself spiraling downward into a familiar depression. If I’m lucky, it will hit me: well, of course, you haven’t been upstairs in two weeks! So I’ll climb the stairs to find the room quietly waiting for me, unchanged, the cushion sitting still on the rug, the messy dog blanket rumpled in position next to it. The dog might be there too, looking up with inquiring eyes, as if to say, Where have you been? And I remember, once again, that if there’s anything I think I’ve lost, I just need to go upstairs to find it.

Writing itself can be a meditation, a time where we simply observe and become curious about where those observations lead us. We allow the noise of the day to subside in order to hear a deeper voice — one that is always present but often muted, and sometimes all it takes is a simple “call to attention” to bring this voice forward.

This call doesn’t necessarily need to come from a fancy meditation bell or expensive equipment ordered from catalogs. It might be as simple as really tasting those first few sips of your morning coffee before you start reading the paper or listening to the radio. Or taking just a minute to study the branches of a tree outside your window, seeing how they change in small increments day to day. Or it might be something as simple as tapping an ordinary pen against your cereal bowl, finding something — anything — that resonates to begin your day with a subtle, vibrant, call to attention.

Coming to attention: it’s what writing is all about. We are here to pay attention, to observe and take in what the world offers at every turn. Only through paying attention can we offer back to our readers that world now transformed through our authentic voices. As Laraine Herring says in her book Writing Begins with the Breath: “Writers struggle to find their voices because they struggle with the process of listening. When we as writers talk about finding our voices, we mean: What do I sound like when there is nothing and no one else speaking? What do I have to say once the distractions of my life are stilled?” Writing begins with listening, and listening can begin with the simplest bell of mindfulness, inviting you to just stop a moment and breathe

When you’re working this way — quieting down, really paying attention — you’ll begin to feel like a genius. Really! The derivation of that word genius means simply a god who protects the headwaters, the originating source of a fresh spring. So, to be a genius means really to be original, in every sense of the word: returning to your origin, to “upstairs,” to that quiet space where your true voice waits.

From Holly — Small Noticings Paying attention became a practice for me when I fished salmon commercially for eight years in Alaska. While fishing was the hardest physical work I’ve done, there were also long stretches of time for contemplation: running north in the spring when the days were long and we could run 20 hours, or after we’d set the green, dripping gillnet off the stern of our 33-foot boat and waited for it to fill with silver salmon. The time between was filled with reading, writing, and navigating

What I loved about fishing was the way it grounded me firmly in the moment with whatever needed attention: twenty sleek king salmon waiting to be cleaned; a storm gathering; a ten-hour run back to town through the red and green blinking lights of Wrangell Narrows. We needed to pay attention to the way the wind veered out of the southwest and picked up to forty knots. We needed to pay attention to the odd clatter in the diesel engine when we ran it at 600 rpms. I needed to pay attention to my body: my stomach turning queasy as we rounded the cape and headed out into open waters.

I found the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh as a mentor in the practice of paying attention. On my fishing trips, I stashed one of his books next to my bunk, and I read it each night once I came off wheel watch. At last, I could put a name to what I’d already come to call “Wheel watch mind”: mindfulness practice. Breathing in, I breathe in the world, breathing out, I release my thoughts. Again and again, I repeated this phrase until it seemed true: that I could pour my mind out onto the horizon, that I could become as empty and light as the hollow bones we found littering the beach when we went ashore.

No wonder then, when I remember this, that my mind feels bigger, for the word attention comes from the Latin attendere, which means “to stretch, especially the mind.” We attend whenever we pay close attention. Scientists practice this way of seeing; throughout history, explorers paid attention in order to return home with their discoveries. Today we often use this phrase to refer to errands — we attend to details, to our affairs — but attending to is perhaps most significantly a sacred act. We attend to the sick, the bereaved, the dying. When I attend to all the details of my life in this way, with focused attention, I am connected both to myself and to the world outside my window.

Poet Samuel Green calls these daily observations “small noticings,” and in his book The Grace of Necessity, he includes a section called “Daily Practice.” Here’s one I especially admire, in part because it’s the poem from which his book’s title is taken and because he wrote it on September 11, 2001:

The nuthatch slams into the bay window. The ledge catches her, keeps her from the cat’s mouth. but she stays there, stunned, caught by the betrayal of air turned suddenly solid. How could she ever move past this moment without the grace of necessity? How could any of us?

Through this “small noticing,” he gives voice to the tragedy that left most of us speechless, the “betrayal of air turned suddenly / solid,” then, how we as readers are taken from this image to his haunting questions: “How could she ever move / past this moment without the grace / of necessity? How could any of us?”

This practice served Green well in writing about a profound event but it also serves him well in writing about what we see each day. I, too, find that this daily practice of observation — sometimes on a walk, sometimes just looking at what’s outside the window — grounds me in the world, allowing me to enter abstract terrain via a concrete image, as Green’s poem does so deftly.

These days, instead of being on wheel watch on a ship, I step out the front door of my cabin and walk ten steps to my writing studio. Like a fishing boat, my studio is small, with places for everything I need: books, a desk, a rocking chair. Sometimes my morning poems take the form of haiku, which I can write quickly, wanting to be with whatever is in this moment. At other times, I write notes that, if I’m lucky, gather enough momentum to take flight in a full-fledged poem. Here’s a short poem that began as a “small noticing:”

Last night, rain. This morning, I watch a sparrow hop across the wet wood deck, dip his beak down to sip from each nail hole, each perfect well of imperfection.

When we can begin each day by being fully in the world, noticing even the movements of the sparrow, we bring more of ourselves to the page and more, I hope, to our lives. Perhaps we can begin by considering that everything we see — even the smallest details — is worthy of our closest attention, our witnessing. We can bring this focused attention and sacred reverence to all that we meet each day. And then we can write it down.

Practicing Contemplation and Writing

The Bell: Exercises for Contemplation

Are you able to create a space for yourself that is “sanctified” in some way? Sometimes this consecration doesn’t have to be much: a small table with some significant objects on it, a candle, a picture, anything that allows you to feel that the time you spend here is “different” in some way. Maybe it just means there’s no Internet connection or email accessible in this particular corner. Make it your practice to “stop” for a few moments in the midst of your morning routine. This could mean breathing in and out three times as you wait for your coffee to brew. It could mean stopping for ten seconds before taking your first bite of breakfast. It could mean driving to work without the radio on, and breathing in and out at stoplights rather than planning the day ahead. See if this small practice changes anything in your mood, your perspective, or your ability to find time for writing.

The Pen: Exercises for Writing

Can you remember a time when your work or your play led you into a state of active attentiveness? This could be anything, from making cookies, to building a house, to carefully going over a document you’re sending to a colleague. Write a scene, as Holly did, using concrete details to show us this attentive state. Don’t worry if you can’t remember everything; take liberties to fill in the details. Take note of the small things that helped you be attentive, and perhaps you can bring these qualities into your everyday life now. If you have trouble getting started on the above exercise, start it as a letter to a friend. Letter writing can be a contemplative activity all on its own, and some of the pressure is lifted to make “good” writing; instead, your intent is to connect deeply with someone else. In this age of quick and instantaneous communication, writing a letter can be a welcome break from that quick pace. In this letter, start exactly where you are, describing the setting (what you see, smell, hear, touch), and then allow these details to lead you into a memory of a time when you felt completely present. As Samuel Green does in The Grace of Necessity, take ten minutes to describe what’s right in front of you, wherever you are writing. Keep writing for the whole time, not worrying about the content or the quality of that content. Don’t even read this work when you are done. Just shut the notebook and begin your day. These are the “small noticings” that can lead to larger things. After a few weeks, go back and read what you’ve written to see what kernels you can take away, and what themes or images seem to keep popping up on their own.

From Brenda — Sharpening the Pencil I live down the street from an elementary school and a large park filled with old-growth evergreens, so most mornings I see children in packs walking to school. When I have the time, I love to sit on my front porch and just be on “wheel watch,” as Holly put it, in my own neighborhood: seeing what I can see.

I see the older kids with their backpacks, girls talking in clumps (always one girl struggling to keep up, nudged just a little aside from the main group, an eager tilt to her head — that would have been me at her age). I see boys on their scooters, yelling to one another, and then the younger kids, kindergartners, holding the hands of parents, who often have a dog on a leash.

A few minutes later, I’ll see the parents and dogs and baby strollers going in the opposite direction, toward home, their strides now quicker, more purposeful, and I think about how everyone’s day will now unfold: the children safely in school, learning what they need to know; the dogs back home, in their beds, chewing on rawhide bones; the parents at work or at home, doing the work they need to do, all of them sustained by routine. And me here, on the porch, sitting in a room that is not a room, simply bearing witness.

Now here’s a latecomer: a mother hugs her son at the corner, yells “have a good day” as he walks alone down the sidewalk, too big now to be walked all the way to the schoolroom door, so they’ve reached this compromise — part way. Part way he can be accompanied; part way, he must travel alone.

All these people and animals walk through the city rose garden next to my house. Every other day, a woman comes to the garden and prunes the dead blooms; she’s careful in her work, moving from bush to bush in her straw hat, clipping only those roses that need to be clipped at this exact moment. The remaining flowers gleam from her attention, intensify in color, though she has not touched them at all. She has removed only what gets in the way.

Watching her makes me eager to write. Not to write about anything momentous, but only about the small daily observations that make up our lives. To write about, for instance, the big yellow school bus roaring by, and the small heads I see of the children, some of them just barely reaching the windowsills. Noticing this small detail allows me to remember my own walks to school, and how I both yearned for and feared the bus, how I was almost always alone but longing for the company the bus seemed to contain. And then I remember my own eagerness to simply be at school, at my wooden desk, where learning seemed almost magical — letters and numbers arranging themselves into miraculous sense. We were told constantly to pay attention, and I did, yes I did.

Now the school bell rings and all the children settle in for the day, listening to their teachers, sharpened pencils scratching against lined newsprint. I feel as though all morning I’ve been “sharpening” my own pencils, preparing myself to write, simply by watching and listening. It’s from this kind of observation that I gather both my material for writing and the necessary state of mind, the patience, to sit down and do it.

The simplest observations can often lead us to simple wisdom. In her book On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, & Holiness, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew describes what she observes when entering her house through the back door:

Coming in from the yard, I face shelves overcome with jars: oregano, paprika, and curry roosting in vast extended families; beans, rice, lentils, and bulgur paling in the sunlight; the baking clan (unsweetened chocolate, a jug of honey, coconut, lugubrious molasses, crocks of sugar and flour) awaiting the release of their internal chemistry. Here is the bin for garlic, onions, and potatoes, sprouting their primal appendages. Here are cans of tomatoes and mandarin oranges and coconut milk. Here are the boxes (bright red) of macaroni and cheese. Outside, the garden is wending its weedy way toward zucchini heaven, while inside the ingredients sit, prepared to receive their summons. They will become whatever we make of them.

This amusing inventory — chock full of detail but also infused with Andrew’s humor and perspective — sets her on the way to a deeper meditation on her life, her spiritual path, and her struggle with doubt:

For years I’ve floundered as my former understandings of God (parental, omnipotent, theistic, held pedestal high) have gone out with the compost, and I’m left mucking around in the dirt looking for holiness. I no longer know what is sacred, what is not, and how to relate to it all. How does one worship the pervasive pulse of life, the season’s spinning, the pantry’s potential? Prayer has been turned inside out, so the words I used to send toward heaven now might as well be spoken to my own mysterious heartbeat, and the guidance that used to come clearly has receded into an indiscernible but beneficent hum….

So I dig down into the details I do know: these jumbled jars, these bags of trash….My collection of dry goods doesn’t evidence any culinary skills so much as a love for translucent grains of rice, brittle strands of spaghetti, and the shriveled red hides of sun-dried tomatoes within glass jars. The hard beans, black and navy and pinto, feed me with their beautiful waiting bodies long before I pour them into the pot. Abundance greets me each time I enter the house, and I respond with reverence.

After these careful observations of the ordinary details of her home — observations that lead to what seems like an effortless insight — Andrew says: “Anything at all can become the stuff of a spiritual life.” That’s the lesson we can learn by watching, listening, and being in the world with our full attention. If we train ourselves to be alert, we too will experience an abundance that spurs us to “respond with reverence” in our writing.

From Holly — Observing the Natural World

Not too long ago, I spent a week on Hornby Island in British Columbia, at the Grassy Point Guesthouse where my friends and I ate dinner each evening on a spacious wood deck overlooking the Straits of Georgia, watched the procession of cruise ships heading north, and reminisced about our Alaska adventures together over summers past. We love this sandstone beach, the round mouths of tide pools carved out by the sea, the orange-billed oystercatchers that greet us on our morning walks.

One morning we watched a symphony of purple sea stars creep across the tide pools, each leg moving to a tune we couldn’t hear, so slowly we could only see the movement when we, at last, stopped moving.

When I teach natural history at the community college, I remind my students they need to pay attention, but how quickly I forget exactly what that means. Here, on the island, to pay attention I need to get down on my hands and knees, peer into the clear mouths of the tide pools. Only then do I see how one sea star, the color of a pumpkin, slowly extends one of its five legs, clamps it down hard on the sandstone, then does the same with its next leg. Only then do I look more closely at the jigsaw puzzle of orange and purple legs, and see that one sea star has, in fact, six legs.

One morning, I walked this beach with my friend Katy and her ten-year-old son, Lee. While Katy and I studied the mosaic of sea stars, Lee was catching baby sculpin with his bare hands. He turned to me and said, “Look Holly, here’s another one. This one’s really big. Come take a picture of it.” Seeing him on his hands and knees, up to his elbows in the sea, reminded me that this curiosity is second nature when we’re ten — but too often we outgrow it. If only we can return to our ten-year-old selves from time to time, get down on our hands and knees, and see what surprises might reward us for our time and close attention.

Our first summer on the island, inspired by the nature sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy, we created our own rock and driftwood sculptures. My partner, John, started it, piling four stones and balancing a stick of driftwood on top. Then he turned to our friend Jake, saying, there, your turn. Jake, never one to turn away when the gauntlet has been thrown down, took the challenge seriously, spending the rest of the afternoon creating an enormous, elaborate driftwood sculpture in the shape of a mandala. Soon all eight of us were out there stacking rocks, dragging driftwood, gathering undulant ribbons of bull kelp, looking for bright shells. By the time the tide came in, we’d created an entire sculpture exhibit and, in the best Andy Goldsworthy tradition, I photographed it just minutes before the ocean wiped the slate clean.

On the island, the conditions seem to call me to return to the life of the imagination, to let myself to be fully immersed in reading, writing, walking. Everything seems important: the way the mussel shells lie open to the sea, the spiral shell pointing the way. As I walk amid the shards, I begin to inhabit another world altogether. As David James Duncan so eloquently put it: “I suddenly fell through a floor inside myself and landed amid an intensely recollected experience.”

For example, just now, I’ve dropped into a memory of walking along the lake with Heide, my best friend from high school. It’s fall, and we’ve just come upon, inexplicably, seven perfect red apples washed up in the sand. I’m filled again with our seventeen-year-old sense of wonder, of living in a universe in which apples are offered so freely. This could become a new poem.

I’m reminded of a book I loved growing up: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s, Gift from the Sea. I go inside, find it on the shelf, take it down, read again my favorite passage:

“Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.”

Through writing, reading, and ordinary contemplative practice, we can lie empty and open to any gifts that might wash up wherever we are — not just at the sea, or on an island — but wherever we find ourselves, open to anything that might present itself.

Practicing Contemplation and Writing

The Bell: Exercises for Contemplation

Spend an hour (or even just a few minutes) on your front porch, front steps, or a park bench, doing nothing. No reading. No writing. Just observing. What do you see? What do you learn about your neighborhood? Also observe your own feelings as you do this exercise: is it difficult to sit still without distracting yourself? What kinds of thoughts or chatter enter your mind? How do you handle your own resistance to “doing nothing?” Is there a moment when you can feel your resistance lessening? What does that feel like? Visit a beach, park, or other natural area, such as a forest or meadow, where there’s a variety of natural objects. Using rocks, driftwood, shells, pine cones, leaves or any other natural object you find, create a small sculpture, then photograph it. When you’ve finished, return the objects to their original places, as if you’d never been there. Observe how this small act of imagination changes your perception of the place.

The Pen: Exercises for Writing

Write down the sensory images that stay with you from an hour of observation on the front porch. What did you hear? What did you smell? What did you see? For example, in her poem “Salt Heart,” Jane Hirshfield records the sensory details of an afternoon dozing in her backyard — hearing the buzz of a bee in the lavender, the neighbor’s trowel hitting stones in the dirt — and in this trance state the poem transforms into a meditation on the transient nature of joy. Here are the beginning lines

I was tired, half sleeping in the sun. A single bee delved the lavender nearby and beyond the fence, a trowel’s shoulder knocked a white stone. Soon the ringing stopped. And from somewhere, a quiet voice said the one word. Surely a command, though it seemed more a question, a wondering perhaps — “what about joy?’

Notice how she hears what’s on the surface, and then allows these details to transcend the physical world. But you don’t need to force such meaning. Your observational writings may simply remain “practice” writings that help you hone your powers of observation and description. The most important thing you can learn as a writer is that all writing is practice. We have to love the practice itself, and not necessarily the product of that practice.

Write a memory of being in school as a young child. What small moment remains lodged in your memory? What got you excited about learning? Can you remember that time when you were so open to the world? Infuse this memory with sensory details, whether or not you think you are making them up. See if these details lead to unexpected insights. As Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew does in her book On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood & Holiness, write an inventory of everything you see when you enter your home through the door you use most often. What do these things say about you, your life, or your deepest yearnings? Return to the beach, a park or other natural area to observe, listing every type of creature you see, then noting their interactions. As you describe this scene, see if a theme emerges, as it does in this excerpt from “Entering The Kingdom of Invertebrates” by Lee Gulyas:

At the edge of rocky shores aggregate anemones cluster by hundreds in pools,

pale green carnivores with pink-tipped tentacles clones, elongated, dividing at will

while on the rock above, thousands of barnacles, small volcanoes, extend their feathery plumes

and filter food from water. Hermaphrodites, they slip their lengthy organs

into any neighbor, a web of mantle and chamber, simultaneous sexual flurry.

….Sea cucumbers and urchins broadcast spawn,

scatter egg and sperm outward, sometimes floating miles away, into the sea, everything

left to chance. Sometimes it’s just that easy. Medusas drift in currents, transparent, free.

Note how Gulyas’s observations are made even more precise by her knowledge of science. You, too, can research the precise names for what you observe, as well as startling facts that will deepen your observations and inform your writing.

While visiting the beach or forest, choose one natural object to observe closely. Sketch it quickly in your notebook as a way of moving into closer connection with it. Once you’ve done that, brainstorm a list of sensory details — as many as you can — to describe it, showing it as vividly and concretely as possible. Then, “go inside” the object, imagining its life from the inside, and see where this exploration takes you. For example, in his poem “Stone,” Charles Simic goes “inside a stone” and imagines how it is “cool and quiet” even amid the daily trials and tribulations the stone must endure, even when “a cow steps on it full weight.”

Suggested Reading

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step and The Miracle of Mindfulness

Samuel Green, The Grace of Necessity

Laraine Herring, Writing Begins with the Breath

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, & Holiness

Anne Morrow Lindberg, Gift from the Sea

Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration with Nature

Jane Hirshfield, “Salt Heart” from The Lives of the Heart

Charles Simic, “Stone” from News of the Universe, ed. by Robert Bly

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Now that you understand the mission Brenda and Holly are working to fulfill in their book The Pen and The Bell and have read some of Brenda and Holly’s story as well as their ideas for practice and further reading, visit the blog using the link below and help these master teachers tweak their book and see it published.