Monthly Archives: July 2011

Writing isn’t always a piece of cake

2 Replies

Any excuse to post a picture of a piece of cake….

But it’s true. Writing small stones, or anything, can be difficult.

It certainly is for me. Some days, I’d rather do anything than sit down at my computer and begin the first sentence.

Why is this?

I think a lot of the reason is that when we write, we are trying to say what’s true for us. We are putting something out there that people can look at, and have opinions about. We are exposing our vulnerable underbellies, just like our cat Fatty who lies with his paws in the air and dares you to touch him…

This is also why writing is important. 
Writing gives us an opportunity to share these vulnerable parts. It gives us an opportunity to find our truth, whatever that might be.
So keep writing small stones. Keep working on your novel. Keep writing in your journal. Get support. Carry on. 
We all find it difficult. You’re in good company.

The end, or the beginning?

5 Replies

The July river of stones finishes tomorrow.

You might have taken part this time, and you might not have. You might have religiously written a small stone every day, or had a few false starts, or written three and then forgotten about it completely.

It doesn’t matter.

If you let them, small stones will help you to connect with the world one teensy moment at a time. They will work on you at their own pace.

Every time you pause to notice the exact texture of an egg, or the glittering thread of drool hanging from your happy cat’s chin (yuk!), and wonder how you’d write it down, can be counted as a tiny triumph.

Even if you’ve had ONE of these moments this month, one that you wouldn’t have otherwise experienced, then we’ll be very happy.

We’re always pleasd to hear from people – do let us know by email (Fiona or Kaspa) or in the comments section how you found the experience.

If you’d like to take your writing practice to another level, you could join one of our month-long self-study ecourses starting on Monday – Eastern Therapeutic Writing with Kaspa (koans, Japanese poetry and Morita therapy) or Writing Ourselves Alive with Fiona (curiosity, honesty, compassion & passion).

If you don’t get a jiggle on quickly enough they’ll repeat later in the year – here’s the rest. 

We won’t be posting here again for a while, until we’ve cooked up the next project for our river. We would like it very much if you’d follow us over to the Writing Our Way Home blog, and you could also try Fiona’s weekly inspirational newsletter, or come and say hi at our community. 

Thank you for reading our blog, and for being a very important drop in the river.

An interview with Tad Hargrave: marketing coach for hippies

Leave a reply

This week it’s great to be joined by Tad Hargrave. Tad is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing. Despite years in the non-profit and activist world, he finally had to admit he was a marketing nerd and, in the end, he became a marketing coach for hippies. Maybe it was because he couldn’t stand seeing his hippy friends struggle to promote their amazing, green and holistic projects. Maybe it was because he couldn’t keep a 9-5 job to save his life.

Whatever the reason, for almost a decade, he has been touring his marketing workshops around Canada, bringing refreshing and unorthodox ideas to conscious entrepreneurs and green businesses that help them grow their organizations and businesses (without selling their souls). And, over the years, he has become recognized as a leader in the wider movement towards green and local economies.

Thanks Tad, it’s great to be speaking to someone whose work we feel a great sympathy for. It’s been fascinating for us to think and learn about ways of engaging with the world about Writing Our Way Home, without resorting to traditional marketing and turning them (and us) off… On to the questions:


What drives your creative work? 
I like making things. I’m going to define creative work as ‘creating things’. Making something knew that wasn’t there before. In my case, that’s going to be workshops or ebooks and such. Soooo . . . I think laziness is a big part of it. Once I make a product I don’t need to keep repeating myself. I can just send them to a resource to check out, ‘go read this ebook.’ or ‘watch this video’. that feels really good.

also the process of making these things forces me to really learn it. to refine and articulate what I know in a way that other people will ‘get it’. that helps me whenever i’m working with a client or teaching someone.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
oh wow.

‘chill out.’

when i look back at myself i see so much arrogance. or . . . i was trying to position myself as some amazing marketing guru when i was just starting. wanting to charge the same rates as the bigwigs.

in a lot of ways, it’s all worked out perfectly. i’ve been able to learn and unlearn what i’ve needed. the process of doing it has refined me. but . . . i took it all so seriously. i took myself so seriously.

i feel blessed that i came across the pay what you can practice and philosophy because that feels so authentic and real for me. and it gave me feedback about what was working and what wasn’t.

i don’t know if there’s anything i could say really. but i think i felt really uneasy with some of the approaches I was taking and i wish someone could have affirmed those discomforts and encouraged me to explore them and find alternatives instead of just pushing further. but . . . in a way it really had to unfold the way it did.

How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
hrmmm. the lack of money can become an excellent motivator i’ve noticed – but, for me, money rarely is.

for me it’s never a matter of a lack of ideas either. right now I have 666 (not making that up) separate blog post ideas that i’ve been keeping track of. so . . . it’s not about ideas. when things get tough and i feel blocked, i find that it’s often a sign of overwhelm in other areas. and so the first thing i need to do is tidy my space, make to do lists, clear off my desk top. make space. once that space is there i find that inspiration often returns.

or i need to sit with the difficulty and really listen to it. actually sit quietly somewhere with my journal and really listen in. often that sense of difficulty contains the seeds of new inspiration for something.

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life? 
business wise, every new thing I create makes my life a little more beautiful and harmonious. it saves me time, makes me money or helps people find me.

but it also . . . i feel proud. i feel good. there’s a sense of ‘i made that’. i want to show others. creating things feels like the harvest time – where i can sit back and reflect on all that i’ve accomplished. it feels wonderful.

What is it like to send your work out into the world? 
i love it! by the time i send it out i am usually already pretty proud of it and excited to share it. i love when i get great feedback on things.

What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
don’t do it to IMpress – do it to EXpress.

What helps you to pay attention to the world?
taking space. i never stop noticing the world – but to really pay it attention . . . i need psychic space and that means an orderly environment and lack of clutter. if i’m cluttered up i can’t create. i get useless.

Brilliant, thanks Tad. Check out the rest of the interviews here, and check out Tad’s website here.

Can we ever really ‘see clearly’? (a question, not an answer)

Leave a reply
(photo by MontyPython)

A post from the archive by Kaspa:
By way of the grape vine I heard someone asking “Does knowing we’re going to write about it take away from really seeing what’s there, in the moment?”.
I think that’s a really interesting question, but it points to a deeper question for me “Can we ever really see what’s there?” 
Years ago I used to sit a lot of zazen. Zazen is the meditation of Zen Buddhism, where one just sits. When a thought comes up, you let it go. When another thought come up, you let that go too.  I imagined that if I let everything go I would reach a place of clarity. A place where I could simply be in the world and engage with the world without my own thoughts and prejudices getting in the way.
I think that we probably can wipe the grosser stains of our wind-shields, and see through the glass into the world more clearly. But I’m no longer convinced we can get rid of the glass 
In fact I literally have to look through glass, through a pair of glasses, to see the world clearly. I think this is where the edge is for me. Along with the habits of seeing that I talked about in my last post (Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes) we each have a physical body and how we receive the world is mediated by our senses and then interpreted by our brains to give our conscious mind an experience that makes sense.
So we have a uniquely human  experience of each moment, by virtue of our human bodies. And I believe we have a uniquely personal experience of each moment by virtue of our individual histories. Is it possible to let go of those stories, those traumas and celebrations, entirely? 
Today I’m leaning towards answering ‘No’. But what we can do is recognise all those parts of ourselves and treat them with more care, and appreciate them as the compost from which our poetry can be fed.
None of this answers the original question of course.  This post is already quite long, so perhaps that first question deserves its own post – either that or you can argue it out in the comments below….
“Does knowing we’re going to write about it take away from really seeing what’s there, in the moment?”
(Have a look at what people thought last time here and let us know what you think!)

Writing isn’t always a piece of cake

2 Replies
Any excuse to post a picture of a piece of cake….
But it’s true. Writing small stones, or anything, can be difficult. 
It certainly is for me. Some days, I’d rather do anything than sit down at my computer and begin the first sentence.
Why is this? I think a lot of the reason is that when we write, we are trying to say what’s true for us. We are putting something out there that people can look at, and have opinions about. We are exposing our vulnerable underbellies, just like our cat Fatty who lies with his paws in the air and dares you to touch him…
This is also why writing is important. 
Writing gives us an opportunity to share these vulnerable parts. It gives us an opportunity to find our truth, whatever that might be.
So keep writing small stones. Keep working on your novel. Keep writing in your journal. Get support. Carry on. 
We all find it difficult. You’re in good company.

A million blindnesses (and popcorn)

4 Replies

Fiona writes: I have a long history of eating popcorn.

Last night we went to see the last Harry Potter, and bought a giant tub of fresh sweet crispy popcorn. Mmmmm.

My preferred popcorn-eating-technique is to grab great handfuls and put them on my lap, so I can keep a nice steady stream of kernels going into my mouth. A certain proportion of popcorn always goes astray between the tub, my lap and my mouth.

As I shovelled it between the tub and my lap and my mouth, something suddenly occurred to me.

All the bits of popcorn that were getting lost between the tub, my lap and my mouth would have to be cleared up by someone.

I thought a bit about my previous approach to this lost popcorn. It was as if, because the cinema was dark, all that lost popcorn disappeared into a kind of abyss. I remembered a fleeting thought which in retrospect seemed self-justifying – “Everyone drops lots of popcorn in the cinema”. So that makes it OK?

I pictured the lights coming on, and the scene of carnage that met the people who clean up before the next showing. The half-drunk drink we left at our seat. Chocolate wrappers. And stray fragments of popcorn EVERYWHERE.

What was interesting to me is that I hadn’t been dropping popcorn everywhere on purpose, as a cruel punishment to the people working in the cinema. I’d been blind to their work, and to how I inconvenienced them.

My guess is that I still have a million (at least) of these blindnesses. My guess is that we all do.

Next time I go to the cinema, I’m going to try not to drop any popcorn on the floor, and I’m going to take my rubbish with me. I’m going to remember the people who made my seat all clean for me before I got there. And then I’ll blunder into another situation and cause inconvenience to someone else, my million blindnesses swarming around me.

Podcast: Saved by a Poem

5 Replies

Download mp3 9.5mb

What does it mean to learn a poem by heart?

A couple of weeks ago Fiona and I led a week long course in France, Connecting with others through words and movement. Inspired by our experience running that course and by reading Kim Rosen’s book Saved by a Poem, we’ve been thinking about different ways of working with poetry, and how you can learn about yourself through working with poetry.

You can find out more about Sage Cohen’s book Writing The Life Poetic, which Fiona mentions in the podcast, here.

Fiona also reads Esther Morgan’s This Morning. Esther’s third collection Grace will be available in October. This Morning  won the Bridport prize in 2010.


This Morning

I watched the sun moving round the kitchen,
an early spring sun that strengthened and weakened,
…coming and going like an old mind.

I watched like one bedridden for a long time
on their first journey back into the world
who finds it enough to be going on with:

the way the sunlight brought each possession in turn
to its attention and made of it a small still life:

the iron frying pan gleaming on its hook like an ancient find,
the powdery green cheek of a bruised clementine.

Though more beautiful still was how the light moved on,
letting go each chair and coffee cup without regret

the way my grandmother, in her final year, received me:
neither surprised by my presence, nor distressed by my leaving,
content, though, while I was there.

Esther Morgan

I just wanted to be helpful

Leave a reply

Fiona writes: On the second morning of our silent retreat, after early-morning sitting in the meditation hall and breakfast, my fellow retreatants busied themselves at various tasks around the centre.

Kaspa started to rake hay from the small field. Jnanamati worked in the kitchen. Our teacher Dharmavidya clipped lavender – snip – snip snip – from the big lavender bush we could see from where we sat in the hall, through the wide-open door.


My friends had been in France for many Summers and knew what needed to be done. I was relatively new here. I didn’t know what to do. I had the idea that I could weed the vegetable patch, but I wandered amongst the raspberries and courgettes and leeks and I couldn’t find any weeds. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other. I couldn’t go up to anyone and say ‘what shall I do?’. 

There was no need for me to help. I could have sat and written in my journal, or gone for a walk, or returned to the silent meditation hall. But I wanted desperately to be helpful. 
Eventually, I plucked up my courage. I fetched a pair of scissors from the kitchen, approached Dharmavidya, and held them up, making a question with my face. I felt like a child again. Maybe he wanted to be alone. I was afraid of breaking the rules. I was afraid of rejection.

He nodded.

We snip-snip-snipped the lavender in silence together. The sun was hot. The bush was alive with white butterflies, all sipping at the sweet nectar. The basket got fuller. The air was marbled with birdsong. The butterflies flitted. The sun shone. We snip-snip-snipped the lavender. 




After the retreat, when the silence was over, Dharmavidya brought me the basket and asked me if I’d tie the blooms into bunches and hang them over the beams to dry. By the time I’d finished, my hands were gloriously reeking of lavender.

Things you might be curious about
What is your relationship with helping? How do you get to be helpful? Is there someone you could offer your help to, even if it feels scary? Is there anyone you could ask for help, and so give them the gift of being able to help you? 


This was sent out as our weekly inspiration newsletter – sign up here and have them delivered into your inbox. 

Can we look anew?

1 Reply

There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of of what people before us have thought we were looking at.

Flaubert, quoted in preface to Pierre and Jean, in Maupassant’s ‘The Novel’

A post from the archive by Kaspa:
James Wood quotes Flaubert in How Fiction Works. Wood attributes the rise of the modern novel to Flaubert. But what interested me was the observation above, in a section where Wood is talking about the satisfaction of specific detail. I’ll come back to that in another post.

Our minds are the repositories of stories. We tell stories about people we know, we imagine we know their lives, outer and inner. We tell stories about the places we live in, and about the jobs we do. The most powerful of these stories has to do with how we feel about ourself, “…this is the sort of person I am”. This most powerful of stories tends to be at the heart of all the stories we tell.

Each time we encounter something in the world, a loved one, the view from a mountain top, a favourite book in a library, we receive it through the eyes of these stories. I am the person who loves you, we have this history together… and so on.

Flaubert’s point is that we not only encounter the world through these personal stories, but that we encounter the world through the eyes and memories of others. We inherit stories, from our peers, from our parents and increasingly from the media.

When we see the Union Jack flying, we have a sense of history, of an Empire perhaps and whatever feelings that might bring up, pride or shame. We are full of stories. Who amongst us would only see a few red and blue triangles, printed onto a white rectangle of fabric?

There is a part of each thing which is hidden from us. We obscure with stories, as much as we enlighten with them.

The act of really paying attention is not to ignore these stories, but to see the transparency of them, to see them but to look beyond to the mystery too.

What mysteries will you uncover today?

An interview with Joslyn Hamilton: recovering yogi & writer

4 Replies

This week we’re delighted to welcome Joslyn Hamilton to our creative interview series. After ten years in the yoga industry as a teacher, studio manager, and minion for alleged “gurus,” Joslyn co-founded the website Recovering Yogi. A refuge for the spiritually disenfranchised, Recovering Yogi tells the humorous and sometimes poignant stories of jaded yogis and new age refugees through blog posts and art. Joslyn lives in Marin County — ground zero of the yoga and new age scene. She passes her time as a freelance writer under the brand Outside Eye Consulting. She emotes weekly on her personal blog, Cirque de Malaise. You can follow Joslyn on Twitter. She’d like that.

Hi Joslyn, thanks for being with us (virtually) today. What drives your creative work? Sadly, I’m a typical depressed artist in that I get more prolific and creative when I feel frustrated, upset, entrapped, or simply full of ennui. Luckily, those are all common emotions in my repertoire.I call my blog Cirque de Malaise. And, of course, disenchantment is where my main creative project — Recovering Yogi — comes from.
 
After ten-plus years working in the yoga world and living in new agey Marin County, I became sick to death of hearing about yoga, gurus, manifestation, and the latest “fix yourself” fad. Recovering Yogi is the antidote — a place to get real. I still go to yoga and hang out with the Burning Man/Secret crowd just enough to be continuously “inspired”!

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career? Don’t be afraid! You’re smart and creative. In the future there will be this thing called “the Internet” that will become a creative tool for you like you can’t even imagine now. Also, make different life choices. Seriously, kid. In fact, if you ever are about to choose one thing, just go right ahead and choose the other. Don’t be afraid and don’t care what other people think. And if they call you “weird,” take that as the highest compliment.

How do you keep creating when things get difficult? Oh, I create more when things get difficult. I’m a writer, after all. Comfort is no friend to creativity. Luckily, though, my lifestyle supports my writing. I’m a freelance writer; I work from home in the solitude of my cozy country cottage; I am single and don’t have kids. So although things sometimes get emotionally difficult, I always have a supportive physical environment in which to emote on the page. Also, I protect my sleep ferociously. Sleep is my number one ally.

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life? As I get older I find that I care much less about what the world thinks about me and much more about simply expressing myself. I grew up in the 80s, when it was all about fitting in. Now, I relish opportunities to be weird and different. On a similar note, I gravitate toward weird people. I find them more interesting.

What is it like to send your work out into the world? It has been interesting — with the advent of blogging and the ability to be more outspoken on the web — to experience how easy it is to share my deep dark thoughts with random strangers around the world. I’ve gotten some pretty vitriolic comments on things I’ve written for Elephant Journal that I didn’t think were controversial. People, they do have their opinions! Just another opportunity to strive for equanimity.

What was the best advice anyone gave to you? I spent a long time in the yoga world, so I’ve gotten a LOT of advice, That said, the best advice I have ever gotten so far: Never give or take advice. I aspire to this.

What helps you to pay attention to the world? My glasses, for starters. I have two pairs — one for using my computer, and one for driving. I can’t wear contacts because I have a lazy eye. So I am constantly switching glasses. Sometimes, though, I opt to skip the glasses and let my vision be fuzzy. That’s when I don’t want to pay attention to the world. I also use my iPhone as a shield when I’m in social situations where I don’t want to engage. It’s all about managing my level of social engagement so I can stay somewhat lost in thought. That edge, where the internal world meets external experience, that’s where creative expression is born, I think.

Thanks for your answers, being real and recognising our ordinary humanness is an important message, I think. Here’s to being real!


All the best,


Kaspa & Fiona