In The Heart Aroused:  Poetry and Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, poet David Whyte writes:

The core of difficulty at the heart of modern work life is its abstraction from many of the ancient cycles of life that allow the silence and time in which true appreciation and experience can take place.  The hurried child becomes the pressured student, and finally the harassed manager.  The process is begun very young, and can be so in our bones, depending on the pressure of our upbringing, that the inability to pay real attention to our world may be difficult to recognize.

In helping us retrieve silence and time, Whyte also points out that, “the mythic code for ‘a very long time’ is usually ‘three days and three nights.’”

Three days and three nights means an initiation, it means the process goes on longer than you would have it go on.  Many scholars think it is connected to the moon’s disappearance for three days each month, the darkest stretch of the heavenly cycle.

I read David Whyte’s words and thought about the stories he brought up, Jonah’s three days and three nights without food in the belly of the whale and Gilgamesh’s three days and three nights in a cave without food or water. These are both examples of time for deep contemplation necessary because of crisis.  That they occur over three days and three nights is testimony to the depth of the contemplation and its importance—it is not only a long, long time but a deep time, underscored by the fact that these events take place under the surface of the ocean and inside the earth.

I realized that writing for “three days and three nights” could help prose writers and poets write deeply, lyrically and well.  But for what reason would they, in the tradition of Jonah and Gilgamesh, spend three days contemplating?

As I thought about contemplation, I remembered a story I read in the University of California at Berkeley’s student paper.  A chemistry student from the Middle East was relating how, when newly arrived in the United States, he kept noticing people outside his classes and lab talking about “the solution to the problem.”  He imagined a chemical solution into which a problem dissolved–not to be solved but to come out of solution altered.  He was musing about how this might be more like what really happens in life.

 That story and the idea that a cycle of time helps us “appreciate and experience” combined for me into an exercise aimed at encouraging writers to create the solution in which a problem can be soaked.

****

Three Days and Three Nights

Think about difficult choices or situations you are hopeful or fearful about.  To help yourself do this, write the phrase “problem” in the center of a blank page. Think of the problems in your life right now and write them down surrounding the center word. These can be small or large problems, ones that are completely unanswerable as well as ones to which you just do not yet know an answer.  Keep writing down phrases that describe problems, dilemmas or worries and you will probably discover that one is bothering you more than others, and it may be one that wasn’t one of the first that you wrote down. For instance, if I write down “cats scratching up the wood on my deck and moldings,” I might think of my problem as “deciding whether to give the cats away or keep them.”  While I consider the question, “Shall I or shall I not find a new home for my cats?” I might suddenly think of another problem.  I might write down, “caring meaningfully for aging parents.”  My mind might have made an association between the desire to be free of the cats’ annoyingly damaging ways and the feeling of being unable to ever give away the problems of caring for one’s parents.

If I write “caring meaningfully for aging parents” on my blank page, as I think about my position regarding my mother and her needs, I might start thinking about the time when my daughter will be thinking about me and my needs as an elderly person.  What am I thinking I will need? What would I like to avoid needing?  How would I like to be different when I am older than my parents? What is my problem now regarding this area of life? What must I do now and what might I have to accept as I think about my own aging and my daughter’s future caring?  Now that’s a problem that compels me to write.

Try your hand at writing the phrases that represent your problems or worries and concerns.  After you have written down phrases about problems and the questions you associate with them, select one of the problems you’d most like to meditate on and consider.  Make notes about the people and details you think about when you think about the problem.

Next, you will write at three successive times, either at the same time each day or night or from the same place at different times for three sessions.  Make sure one element of the exercise stays the same over the cycle of days, whether that is the place or the time, to help anchor the writing and keep you from wondering how you will start each of the three sections of the writing.  Each time you sit down to write, think for a moment about your “problem.”  Do not write it down, though.  Instead, begin by writing about what you observe wherever you are writing, including the details of the day or night you are writing. You don’t have to make the details have anything to do with the problem; they just have to include imagery from your writing place that seem right to include.  These details will, I believe, choose themselves and put themselves into the writing.  It won’t be too long before images from the immediate writing situation and time cause you to make associations to the problem.

To sum up: in each of the three writing sessions, images of the day or night or place will eventually mix in with the details of the designated problem. All you have to concentrate on at each sitting is using specific imagery from your surroundings and from your problem until you feel that you have said all you can. At the next appointed time or place, you will continue writing for a second session and then a third, each time beginning with observations about where you are writing before allowing the associations in.

The finished writing will be in three parts and you can title each with consecutive numbers or with the time of day or night you wrote or with information about where you were when you wrote each time.  Because each of the parts was driven by your desire to understand or solve the problem, by the time you finish the third session of writing, you will have created a solution of words into which the problem is dipped, and you will observe an answer or resolution rising out of what began in the darkness of unknowing.

Remember, you are not striving to solve the problem, only to create the “solution” in which the problem can soak.  After that “very long time” of three separate sessions, something will shift and your words will offer not only insight, resolution and understanding, but take readers on a journey that moves them.

I am very interested in seeing what happens for you when you write in this cycle.  I hope you’ll send the drafts as you have them.