WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Most of you know that each day of the week is connected to a planet, which is in turn connected to a god or goddess. Each of these relates to a color, a metal, a crystal, a personality. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe these soul qualities are or are not ‘real.’ What matters is that color can help you weave a pattern of balance and simplicity into your busy life.

How?

For one thing – by keeping it simple. Simplicity is the essence of calm, harmony, serenity. Having to choose between a number of things is stressful. Becoming aware of color can simplify our lives enormously. This is true even in something as basic as deciding what to wear: If it’s Friday – a day symbolized by the serene green of Aphrodite, the goddess of love – reach for a mint green sweatshirt; no agonizing. If it’s Saturday, wear dark blue jeans. At the mind-numbing market, if you can’t decide between blueberries or strawberries, let the color of the day be your guide. Accessories are easily decided on as well: reach for those moonstones or pearls on Monday, or the grey and purple silk tie. Not only is this relaxing, but it makes mundane tasks much more fun. When my children were young I’d often avoid arguments by pointing out that they had to eat their green broccoli because it was Friday. Or that the red t-shirt was just right since it was Tuesday.

Another way color can help us is by tempering our temperaments. Each color has a different vibration, and each one impacts us differently. Burger King has known this for years (all that pink and orange actually does make us eat faster). Blue draws us inward to a place a quiet. Yellow does lift our spirits! By becoming conscious of all the different colors in our limited spectrum, we balance our natures. Otherwise we might be particularly drawn to reds, and then lose the blue-ness of our interior being. Or we might be fond of green, but forget to absorb the soul of purple. Balancing our melancholic tendencies by wearing yellow, or soothing our anxiety with a peaceful green, makes sense.

Originally, the Ancient Greeks named the days week after the sun, the moon and the five known planets. The planets were named after the gods Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Cronus. The Romans substituted their equivalent gods for the Greek gods: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.  Eventually the Teutonic peoples substituted the Latin names for the gods with their own: Tiu, Woden, Thor, Freya. Saturn remained the same.

Here’s an abbreviated outline of the soul qualities of each day:

Monday – Selenes/Luna later Artemis/Diana: lavender or dark blue. The day of the moon is internal, emotional, reflective, a great day for quiet and meditation.

Tuesday – Ares/Mars/Tiu: red. The warrior god helps us in our search for Self, standing up to others, fighting for the good, working hard…he symbolizes action and energy. In Norse mythology Tiu was the god of war and sky.

Wednesday – Hermes/Mercury/Woden is the messenger god. His color is yellow. This is a great day to handle communications and accomplishing tasks that require mental acuity.  Hermes (or Mercury) is known as the god of commerce, communication, invention, and travel. In Norse mythology, Woden is known as the headstrong leader of the wild hunt.

Thursday – Zeus/Jupiter/Thor. Orange. Kingly. Expansive. Friendly. Opportunity, luck, good fortune. A good day to look at the big picture or start a new project under the generous auspices of Zeus, the Greek king of the gods. Thor is the god of thunder and Roman Jupiter created thunder and lightning.

Friday – Aphrodite/Venus/Freya. Green. The goddess of love and beauty appreciates the attention you pay to beautifying your environment and yourself, as well as socializing with those you love.

Saturday – Cronus/Saturn. Dark blue or black. Saturn helps with the details: making sure everything is on track in the material world. He’s there to help you over the long haul. He’s also known as the god of agriculture and time.

Sunday – Helios/Apollo/Day of the Sun. White. Apollo is the storyteller, the musician, the poet, the god of light. This is a good day to be creative.

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Fun Writing Practice

Each day this week make a conscious effort to be aware of the day’s color. Today is Thursday: note the orange instances in your life. A coffee cup, a tangerine, a bookmark, a shopping bag… where do you see something orange?

Write down everything you find that is the color of the day and describe the items using the soul quality of that color. Orange is outgoing, it’s a balancer between the heart (red) and the head (yellow), it’s expansive, it radiates. It’s a friendly color. So when you’re describing your orange coffee cup, describe it in a friendly, outgoing way. There are so many variations – millions and millions of shades and moods and tones to every color. Burnt orange is not the same as blood orange or pale salmon. Be as specific as you can when you observe the color.

Noticing color enhances your writing because, as with all description, everything you write needs to be relevant. So if your heroine is wearing a blue dress, it needs to express her dreamy, quiet, or triste qualities. If the house is painted yellow, it represents cheerfulness. (Unless you want to be interesting and show how the yellow paint is peeling, or how the mustard-dark quality of the yellow depicts the lack of cheer – you can get complicated and unusual here.)

The most important thing is to enjoy becoming more conscious about the gorgeous colors in our world. Heightening our awareness of the days of the week, and the gods and goddesses who rule them, and the placement of the planets in the sky, takes us out of ourselves. It’s like watching a rose unfurl, or the leaves on the maple tree beginning to turn. Observing the world around us is crucial to balancing all those stories and ideas that happen inside us most of the time.

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Daily Happinesses

• The plop of a hickory nut
• New socks
• A meaningful dream
• Meeting a leprechaun
• Cowbells
• Holding hands
• Watching a meteor shower with a friend

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Assonance

What a lovely word!

All writers have a natural instinct for using and appreciating assonance, which means to create a resemblance of sound in a phrase by repeating the same or similar vowel sounds.

Sometimes I imagine that language was birthed through assonance – that exquisite, subtle combination of sound and meaning. The dawn of language must have been punctuated by a grunt of love or whisper of fear or murmur of contentment.

The history of language – one of my most cherished subjects – can be very briefly illustrated as a development of meaning into symbol:

Dawn of language: Assonance – only sound carried the meaning of what we said.
Morning: Words were formed to symbolize the meaning of the grunt or murmur.
Noon: Writing was invented in picture-form: illustrations or pictograms to symbolize the words.
Mid-afternoon: The early alphabets were created, which became symbols for the pictograms.
Evening: to be discovered.
Night:

Symbols are tremendously important in our lives, because although a thing can be destroyed, the symbol of it cannot. We use symbols far more than any of us realize. Every word we write is really just a symbol for its meaning. In the pictograms of Ancient China, the word mountain was three upside-down ‘vees’ side by side: a drawing of a mountain! Or take the word ‘quarrel’,’ which was depicted as three women under a roof. These pictures evolved into symbols that nowadays you’d be hard put to extricate the original picture from, even in Chinese. Later, the Phoenicians began to form the earliest alphabets to symbolize parts of the word. What that did, eventually, was to separate a universal language of grunt and feeling (like math or the universally understood STOP sign) into hundreds of different languages with hundreds of different sounds and meaning.

The wonderful thing about the development of language is that we humans have a medium that can convey the spectacular richness of our existence. Throughout the evolution of human consciousness, language has perhaps evolved more than anything else in human beings. It’s moved from grunt to some of the most awe-inspiring, beautiful, complex stories and poems that can be dreamed!

Love language. It’s an extraordinary gift that has been developed wisely for thousands of years.

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Fun Writing Practice

Write assonantally.

As a writer, you may be hardly aware of the rhythm and sounds that emerge in your writing – but for any good writer it’s instinctual. In this writing practice, make it conscious.

The word stems from Latin ‘assonare’: ‘ad’ means to respond to and ‘sonare’ means to sound. When you write assonantally, you’re inspiring your readers to respond emotionally to the quality of the sound in your words.

Usually we’re trying just to express ourselves as clearly and succinctly as possible. In this practice, be more subtle. By writing assonantally you’re not only relying on the meaning of the word to set the tone. Assonance affects your reader more like a painting or a piece of music does.

feet smeared by the sea, a moment’s clear
sky then the dark again, in the shadow of the rooted tree.

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in an assonant poem or paragraph gives you extra power over your reader. Oohs and aaahs, for example, create a sense of awe. Ohs and ayes may create a sense of longing. Play with your moods – read your prose piece or poem out loud. It’s the only way you’ll hear whether it’s working.

(By the way: Assonance also means that you’re in agreement, generally speaking. For example, if someone tells you that gardening is the most perfect activity for a summer afternoon, you might be in assonance – but you also respond by saying that lying in your hammock is just as pleasurable. If you disagree, you’d experience dissonance.)

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Daily Happinesses

• the upper lip of a newborn baby
• a Byzantine icon
• sailing to the Outer Hebrides
• in the still of the night
• opening to the first page
• a flurry of love letters exchanged
• lighthouses

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

When I worked at the last stressful job I hope I’ll ever have, a sensitive and intelligent board member pointed out the reason I was having such a hard time: “Since you’re constantly trying to fend off the alligators, you have no time to drain the swamp.”

Take a look at your day. Most of us are fending off alligators: whether it’s because we’re working at a job that is understaffed, or we’re overwhelmed taking care of young children, or we’re running a company, or we’re simply trying to pay the bills.

How do we drain the swamp, and drive those alligators away?

At my job, I organized everything into three folders:

* Urgent
* Important
* Must-do

Because of the nature of my work, I was always reaching for my Urgent – or “alligator” – folder. I couldn’t miss a press release or advertising deadline! I had to make that call before such-and-such a date! And so forth. Because the Urgent folder filled up on a daily – or even hourly – basis, I rarely touched the Important – or “swamp” – folder. And the Must-do file was ignored and became quite plump.

It wasn’t until I swapped my concept of Urgent and Important that I finally got my head above water. For one hour every day, I pretended I was at a crucial meeting. I refused phone calls and locked my office door, and began to plow through the Important folder. Once these longer-term items were addressed, the Urgent folder began to diminish. I found I wasn’t going to drown in the swamp and be eaten by alligators after all.

Maybe your Urgent folder is not a stressful office job but a houseful of babies (or just one!). Can you swap your thinking around taking care of your baby? Your baby is Important – but she’s not (or at least rarely) Urgent. (What may be Urgent is for you to attend a yoga class, or take a night out with a friend. Or ask your mom or a friend to take your baby to the park, so you can have the house to yourself for one hour. And for heaven’s sake, don’t wash the dishes or run around picking up socks during that hour! That’s Must-Do, not Urgent! Urgent means: Have a long, aromatic bath. Read a book. Write in your diary. Make love. Be alone. Be with your spouse.)

I no longer have babies to keep me from writing, and I left the stress of a job I didn’t love a long time ago. But prioritizing is still a challenge: Urgent tasks such as communicating with clients and friends, organizing freelance work, meeting my own deadlines, and generally clearing the decks tend to take precedence over the less Important work of writing my novel.

We could spend hours on these seemingly urgent things. Yes, the dishes need to be washed. Yes, a client needs a call back. And maybe we’re one of those people who has a problem focusing unless everything is “just right.” But creativity is not going to flow unless we place it in our Urgent folder, and deal with everything else as just Important.

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Fun Writing Practice – Ask Yourself “Is this Vital?”

Imagine that your creative work is the only thing in your Urgent folder: it is what you need to get to before anything else is attended to. If you have a job or children or other obligations that are going to impede on the time you’ve set yourself for creative work, ask yourself: “Is this task vital?” Using that word will help you put your priorities into perspective. Is it vital that the floor is mopped? Is it vital that I open that email?

Only something vital should impede your creative time.

This week, make writing – or any creative endeavor – a priority. Your creative body is just that: a body that needs to be treated with as much care and respect as a boss, an employee, a friend, a baby. If you consistently put that body aside in favor of other, more pressing, items that require your attention, you may wake up one day and find that it’s not sitting around waiting for you. Your creative life is not something to take for granted.

Begin with a routine that heralds the space and time that writing requires. Turn off all the distractions that make it so hard to be in that creative space – your phone especially. Light a candle, or make that coffee or green tea, or ring a bell, or play a short melody on your recorder. Do something significant that says “Now I begin.” In that space and time, even if you spend it looking out of the window or staring at your screen, you’re allowing your creative body to enter. Love it as you would a baby or a lover! Love that space and time – and let it be. You’ll establish a habit that automatically ensures Creativity will be there for you, because you have shown that you are there for it.

The hardest part about prioritizing in this way is that you’re challenging typical expectations. You may find your friends, colleagues, clients, and relatives expect you to place them in the Urgent folder. From the time we were young children, we’ve been told that artistic creative “fun” play is not nearly as urgent as learning the alphabet and the times tables. Question that! Fly in the face of the mindset of the world around you. Your inner voice, your creative soul, your longing to write is the most vital thing in the world! Be available.

Because in the end are you going to remember a deadline you missed or the time you didn’t wash the dishes? Or are you going remember the peace and satisfaction of writing a poem or rereading a story that poured out of you one morning, early?

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Daily Happinesses

• the path through the woods at dusk
• a pelican on the beach in Mykonos
• being handed a long-stemmed rose
• a box at the opera
• tremendous generosity
• a wonderful surprise
• birthday cake

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

One of the most well-known cards of the Tarot is the Magician, or the Juggler. Every esoteric path begins with the Magician, who teaches that what is essential in the beginning of any journey is learning to accomplish the task at hand with effortless concentration. This effortless concentration, or ‘flow,’ is described by author Mihaly Csikszentmihaly as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

An artist like Din Yanyong, for instance, studied for many years how to draw and paint detailed still-lifes and animals. Eventually, he could draw a picture of a horse using only one line.

For a pianist, the effortless concentration comes from thousands of hours of practicing scales over and over, until one’s fingers are one with the piano. It’s then that one can freely play.

The poet Robert Frost wrote “Stopping by the Woods on Snowy Evening” after having stayed up one summer night writing a long – and forgettable – poem called “New Hampshire.” Exhausted, he went outside and saw the sun rising, and was suddenly inspired to write a poem “about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had a hallucination in just a few minutes without strain.”

For a writer, after mastery of the craft has been achieved, the concentration without effort often comes from letting go. We are too much in our heads, and when we turn off the switch and simply let go, amazing things can happen.

But letting go may be the hardest practice.

One excellent method to help you achieve this is to dance. Seriously. It’s transforming work into play, which is part of the secret of flow. For me, sufi dance – or all middle eastern dancing, for that matter! – is the way I release and join with the flow that tends to get clogged in my writing. There is nothing more transporting than to move to the yearning notes from the ney, the rich strumming of the oud, the resounding zills and darbuka. Whether intensely rhythmic, sorrowful, joyful, profound, the melodies and voices weave through my heart like syrup – sweetening, energizing – and take me out of myself.

The music that moves me may not be the music that moves you. Although I admit I dance to just about anything: Celtic folk songs, Motown, the mournful Japanese koto, African drums, Brazilian samba, Hawaiian hula… you’ll need to choose the sounds that draw out your imagination, as well as getting your toes to tap. It’s not just about your body moving, but your heart moving as well.

Here’s a poem by Rumi:

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.

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Fun Writing Practice – Dance

Yes, dance.

Schedule an hour for this. Close the door, turn off the phone, and don’t allow any interruption. Dance the whole time. Sometimes when we used to dance in Stephanie Forest’s legendary classes, much of the dance class was spent lying down with our eyes closed. Sometimes only our hands moved. Still, it was all dancing.

The important thing is to listen, and to let your mind and body be carried by the music. Let your breathing breathe itself, let your body move by itself.

You’ll find, at the end of the hour, that you have a whole new ‘flow’ to your state of being. Dancing reminds you that there’s no separation between mind and body, and the energy that is released is indeed effortless. We tend to focus too much in our heads when we write, and that can create frustration and blockage. Dancing frees us. Even better, it teaches us to transform work into play, to make things easy and light. Writing is a joy.

This week’s task is to enter a state of concentration without effort, where you as a writer become one with your inner self, your pen, your time and space, and the words you write. It’s to recognize this truth: when you’re in the flow, it’s all one.

Even after your hour is up, try to dance as you wash the dishes, dance as you head into the classroom, and dance while you’re talking on the phone or filling your car with gas.

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Daily Happinesses

• fresh stuffed grape leaves with lemon
• sitting under a palm tree
• finding the old woman in the hut and asking the question
• vegans
• getting dressed for the ball
• low summer stars
• a tree that blooms diamonds

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

I know it’s summer, and today it’s particularly hot and drowsy, but it occurred to me that deep thinking and drowsy summer afternoons are not necessarily incompatible.

Stream of consciousness: Basically, it’s eavesdropping on the heart and mind of a character – being privy to his or her innermost private thoughts. By writing in this style, we’re exposing the most intimate qualities of a human being, ones that we are hardly aware of even in ourselves. After all, how often do we think about what we are thinking about?

William James defined four aspects of consciousness, which I loosely interpret thus:

1. deeply personal, individual
2. always changing
3. never ceasing
4. interested in some things to the exclusion of others; all the time making choices about what to be conscious of

These are all important, but the last, to us writers, is the most fascinating. Why do we glom onto the little red wagon or the sound of the rooster crowing in that particular poem or story? There are at least a hundred other experiences on the fringe of our consciousness that we could have chosen instead. What we decide to leave out of our story is as important as what we include.

The streams of images, thoughts, and emotions that flow when we write this way are not mere shattered fragments. They are windows into the heart of the character we describe. We’re taking our reader on an interior journey, one that synthesizes the experience of weather, or horror, or love with the person experiencing it, rather than the old-fashioned style of writing which was more analytical or descriptive.

The task is not to write about a ‘real’ world, but rather to synthesize experiences, pain and suffering, and ideas with a world that doesn’t really make much sense. Face it – there’s an awful lot of unexplainable mystery going on all around us, all the time. What is life? What is your purpose? Where does the universe begin or end? And on and on. Writing from the heart of a character in this way brings us back to a sense of one-ness, with others, and with the world itself. There is no longer the separation of object–subject, or “I and thou.” We are actually creating ourselves, as much as we create characters, countries, and stories. And perhaps that is as much as we can understand about life anyway.

So write buoyed by wild thyme and forgetmenots, in the shade of thickly branching maples. The funny bubbling noises of the brook. It’s at the bend in the river that the world began. Sandcastles and red pails – Dotty calling from the ice cream truck. The branches sway. Somber telegram. Oh, there’s a robin! And then that boy kissed me – he had fond eyes, but fond of what? We were in a barn and had lost the others. The bobolink singing its heart out and a cherry pie and my mother is still around. I think we’ve heard that song before; the stars seem extra big tonight. A long boat ride to the island. Dancing with my father to Benny Goodman, and the notes were all silver and streamy. Sometimes, somewhere, the sun doesn’t set. That was a good voyage, when the sea met the horizon.

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Writing Practice

Using stream of consciousness, write three paragraphs that describe your life. But only use summery analogies or memories or metaphors.

Do this same exercise every day this week, and see how differently your autobiography emerges in each one. Some will have a mood of nostalgia, others of bliss, others of a discovery or a person… see if you can latch onto a theme or mood as you let your mind stream through your past and cull imagery and feeling, and in an abbreviated version, tell your life story.

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Daily Happinesses

• the tiger stalking through the jungle
• painting the barn
• acceptance
• staying up all night talking
• cornflower blue
• swimming holes