A writing colleague of mine once shared in an essay that when she angrily broke up with a beloved college boyfriend under duress because her father didn’t like him, she took the Dutch oven they used for cooking and buried it in the backyard before she left. The topic of the essay was finding him fifteen years later and marrying him, metaphorically unearthing the pot. Burying the past and unburying are both about letting go. By writing about tangible objects we can both do and undo.

Here’s a writing exercise inspired by my colleague’s personal story and published in my long out-of-print book, A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery (which is soon to be updated and available again):

Make a list of things in your house that were given to you by other people. Choose one of these items; it can be one you like or dislike. For whatever reason, even if you don’t want to, imagine you are going to give it a burial somewhere specific today.

Write about the object, how it came to be in your house, why it is time to bury it and where you will bury it. Describe yourself digging a hole. How do you carry it to the place you will bury it? What do you say as you bury the object? What do you think when you arrive back in your house again?

Here is an example of one exercise outcome written by Mara Davis, a participant in a workshop I taught as I was writing this book. A Tucson resident and retired therapist, at the time I met her, she had taken up ballroom dancing and writing.

Today I am going to bury you. You are so beautiful: pink and white, shiny (like a rippled seashell), heart-shaped with the hands of mother and infant reaching out to touch amongst floating flowers.

Yet I am so terribly sad to give you up. You who are the only tangible reminder of my dearest friend. A true love gift. But, I know where our journey will end. It will end on the beaches of Florida’s Siesta Key. A beach that he and I walked so many times holding hands, seduced by the waves and the sun.

I will dig a medium-sized hole in the sand, right near the edge of the sea. There the sand will be moist enough for me to carve out a tiny crater to accommodate you. I will take a small child’s shovel and chip steadfastly away at the sand packed tight by repeated footsteps. It won’t take long because you are so small.

I will dig a hole by the sea. A hole to consecrate the place where we took our walks, on so many sunlit days, six years ago. God knows–I do not want to bury you. You who sit on the counter in my living room and shed an iridescent glow upon my life. A glow of seashells, sand dollars, whispered dreams and memories of what could have been.

But bury you I must, in order that my life might go on. To bury you is to bury the part of him that lives in my home weeping unshed tears into the stillness of my heart. To bury you is to wipe away the sadness and the pain of yesterday and embrace the joy of today.

And yet I will insist upon a tiny fence around the mound and marker just inside of it. The way that sea turtle eggs are protected from trampling feet at hatching time. The marker will say, with all due simplicity, ” Given and buried with love. Please do not disturb.

Because my book offers writing ideas for every day of every week in a year, each exercise comes with six extensions. Here are more ways to use this idea for finding surprises in your writing:

1. Think of an object in your home that you overlook, an object that can hold things on or in it—e.g. bulletin board, stainless mixing bowl, mailbox, recycling container, bedroom trash can. Write about this object in adoring phrases especially noting its functional qualities. Now that you have spoken about how this object functions, write about a discomfort in your life by imagining yourself putting the discomfort on or into the ever-present object.

2. Imagine and write about a special bowl that you would design to put somewhere in your home. It is going to be a bowl into which you can put what you don’t want to think about. You can drop messages about those things into the bowl. After you have fully described the bowl, you might want to give it a name. Next, write one of the messages about what you no longer want to think about. Be detailed and specific. Cover everything regarding whatever it is you are going to give up thinking about. Write about dropping that message in the bowl.

3. Write another message for the bowl. Write about dropping it into the bowl.

4. And again.

5. And again.

6. And again.

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People have used the “Burying the Dutch Oven” exercise to express grief and love, as Mara has, and to express humor and frustration or longing. When the object you want to write about presents itself, go with it and see what happens when you fully imagine burying it, even though you may never want to in real life. Writing about tangible objects in this way helps us come at things slant, the only way to find truth really, as Emily Dickinson reminded us in her famous poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant
By Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —