Hope becomes a strong muscle.
“Simplicity, and beauty, and inevitable grace.”
The writer’s realm includes “simplicity, and beauty, and inevitable grace” as Wordsworth phrased it in The Prelude. Who can afford to live without beauty? Beauty fills us; it graces us with joy and lights up our existence. A landscape, a piece of music, film, a dance – we are left bewitched, we are dazzled.
Plato first spoke of beauty as a way.
According to Plato, one can reach infinite beauty by climbing a ladder of increasingly refined aesthetic experience and starting from the more tangible and fleeting realities reach up to universal, timeless levels.
Beauty insists on realities visible only to the eye of intuition. It exists in nature and art, and the hidden paradoxical beauty in the prosaic, the coarse and the painful, sometimes waiting to be discovered. Beauty has a formidable, liberating effect on the human spirit.
The aesthetic experience in the lives of great artists of all kinds offer that the experience of beauty begins with confidence in one’s craft and judgement, and one’s unique sensitivity. And this space is the place of departure, of lift off. Here we enter empathy, and through empathy we are invited to charity, and then in this atmosphere of the beautiful, serenity is evoked.
Beauty speaks to our feelings in a profound and effective way. It opens the mind, and reveals new ways of thinking and being, harmonizing the mind. It enables one to transcend the world and be present to ourselves at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein shared that, “at the end of such performances, performances which I call good, it takes minutes before I know where I am – in what hall, in what country – or who I am. Suddenly, I become aware that there is clapping, that I must bow. It’s very difficult. But marvelous. A sort of ecstasy which is nothing more and nothing less than a loss of ego. You don’t exist. It’s exactly the same sort of ecstasy as the trance you are in when you are composing, and you are inspired. You don’t know what time it is or what’s going by.”
The act of creating harmonizes the mind in the moment. Those of us who choose beauty as our way become finely tuned instruments, able to sense minimal variations. We may perceive color and line, sound, and space, observe the world around us with keen, noble attention, and feel subtle emotion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald affirmed: “A good writer is able to find within what no one else has thought or dared to say – Thus, increases the range of human life.”
Once I was asked by an emerging writer, “How do you do it, write a story?”
My response seemed to disappoint him. I clearly did not satisfy him with my answer to his very huge question.
I said, “Become a skilled worker, a carpenter or plumber. Go to work every day. Show up. Become willing to make the space for the words. Lay the foundation, fill in the details as they are discovered, sometimes revealed. Be meticulous about this. Be noble, even.
When you are frustrated, not getting a targeted result you dream of, plan for, let this mantra become a question and write it down in the script of your own hand: What might happen if I practice this every day? Linger in that possibility.
For this writer, this is where story happens. When one simply yields to the way of the words, the space is created for the story to reveal itself.
What might happen if I practice this every day?
Linger in that possibility.
It is as if story is an entity, and if I am open enough, it shares its nuances and patterns, word by word. It is not necessary for the writer to recognize the pattern at first, but merely to show up, craft sharpened, armed with skill, having read and read, and continue reading and reading. Welcome the quiet and solitude, become available. The openness to the spirit of story, its subtleties, and rhythm is a practice, a discipline, a prayer, the path story manifests in the writer.
Only become willing to show up and be open to the word, to the quiet and solitude it requires.
The thing here is the availability, the willingness, the practice, the faith. This openness makes the writer vulnerable; one cannot feign much, your ego shrinks. This is the way story manifests.
In writing, my own expression of art, I enter a space where the creative mind flows. I think when we-people-of-the-word do this, we enter the flow, learn to cooperate with a greater movement that, if we are open enough, is tapped.
We are companioned by creative thought on this walk, in this work. And, of course, then comes the editing . . . and then, we start all over again.
In this practice, hope becomes a strong muscle.