COMPOSTING

THE DISCIPLINE OF DAILY WRITING

The word "discipline," for many, denotes cruelty - the physical beating of everything in us that makes us lazy. Of course, the word has its origin in the Latin word for "learner of knowledge." Yes, historically "discipline" suggests a giving-in to a corpus of knowledge as a way of being trained for something, as a way of following a certain kind of order: it's about becoming a student.

In her classic work on the writing life, (Writing Down the Bones), Natalie Goldberg (much like Julia Cameron in her The Artist's Way) calls out the inner critic in all of us - you know, the voice whose harsh denigration of every word we have ever hoped to put on paper - and says, "Speak, but only for a little while. Your silence is coming." Goldberg posits that every one of us who dares to write must give time and space to our censor-self, to let his voice ring out and onto paper, so that we can see it, hear it, and experience it for what it is: a lie. Then - and only then- are we ready to write another script, this time a bit less vulnerable to the siren voice that would bid us "Stop!"This one, a bit more like ourselves.

Goldberg advocates strongly for daily "Writing Practice." (Cameron calls this "Morning Pages.") Here is what you do. You get up in the morning, maybe it's still dark, it is almost always eerily quiet. You pick up your pen, you put it to your paper, and you write. You keep writing. You don't stop writing. You don't pick up your pen. You don't cross words or phrases out. You don't give a care to grammatical accuracy, punctuation, or spelling. You don't bother thinking. You throw logic to the wind. You simply write. And when you do it, you go for the jugular, writing everything that is scary, naked, vulnerable. And in so doing you are writing down the bones of who you are, inside and out. You do it every day for either a prescribed period of time or a pre-set number of pages. Every single day. Page after page. Writing it down. Everything. No matter what. Etching every first thing that comes to mind, and the first thing after that.

It is the practice of writing, the weaving of your art. It is the wings your dreams come true on. But...

It is indeed a discipline, in every beautiful and tragic sense of the word.

"First Thoughts," Goldberg calls them, are the shape and substance of the flashing ideas, images, and experiences that come to mind unencumbered by our ego or any other editor. They are the purest, most energetic, deeply authentic expressions of what resides just beneath the surface of things. They are living witnesses to the farce that the world is always logical, immutable, enduring, and permanent. The world is none of these things. And neither are we, most of the time. Which is why, when something comes to mind, no matter how silly or inane, we ought to write it down, letting it marinate in its own juices right there in front of us. We note its fragrance, and rest in it.

In so doing, we are about the business of composting.

Kendra and I live in the city, but we are avid composters. Whatever it might be - onion skins, broccoli stalks, corn cobs, wilted lettuce leaves - we compost it. If neither the thing itself nor what the thing came from ever considered squatting in a field to relieve itself, then we can put it in our tumbler, let it create heat, and wait for the nitrogen-rich material (and its precipitate tea) to serve our little patch of green earth for its own health and ours. We save our scraps, put them away, and let them steam into something new.

Writing, I'm learning, is just like that. It's about composting. It's about collecting ideas, thoughts, experiences, and writing them down, which is akin to walking the long row to the back fence to dump your scraps in the tumbler. It's a cultivation of another kind, and the yield?: patience, less anxiety, perseverance, a letting-go.

The writing life - difficult discipline that it is - is yet another "thing" that we do not control, run, manage, or oversee. We are simply witnesses to these things that appear on our pages. And despite our neurosis that says, "Buy yet another journal and let it sit alone," - a journal that becomes another palette left blank for fear of imperfection - we would do well to pay attention, which is all that writing, living, and loving really are. And then to write it down: What did I see? How did it feel? What am I now because of it?

With pitchfork in hand, I poke around at the steaming pile of debris that is my life, and I cultivate a place where fertility gives birth to new blossoms which yields a new life. And I stand by to watch, point, and smile.

These spaces become my morning pages. Censor inside me beware.