The Thing with Feathers
The creative call in us all and what it can do for us and for the world
Not long after the election results came in, I found myself with an overriding need to be in nature, in hopes that it might remind me of what is natural and enduring inside myself to draw hope from. So I went to a local marina, with the wide wild bay on one side and a protected inlet of calmer water on the other, where I sat on a bench and wrote the following:
I'm sitting on a bench at the Emeryville, California, Marina, looking into a scrub of grasses and then, just below, the placid inlet of the San Francisco Bay. It's protected here, which is why the water is calm and reflective, offering up underwater impressions of the masts of moored yachts.
To the left of where the yachts are parked is a raised wooden pier, where a lone man dangles a fishing rod off the side, and where other people walk the eighth-mile or so to the pier’s end to stare into the open water’s expanse. I made such a walk before arriving at this bench. From the end of the pier I watched, close-up, the bay waters move swiftly, undammed by the pier’s pilings — uncontained, unmitigated waves traveling constantly, quickly, wave upon wave, each rise falling and disappearing into the next.
Then I walked the short distance to the bench by the inlet, to where I am sitting now, seeing in the very same vista both the uncontained waves beyond the pier and the quiet clearing of the inlet just ahead.
Why I'm here at the marina is, in part, to walk off the unusual amount of nervous energy that’s been coursing through me since hearing the election results. I tried for “life as usual” while sitting at my computer and doing my usual work, but there did not seem to be any “usual” about it. Something had changed, and I did not yet have my bearings. An image of the marina flitted across my awareness and I followed it out the door, wanting comfort, ballast, something real. Though on the way, I turned on the car radio and listened to the news. My new preoccupation.
It helped, coming here, a respite in an urban city where the sea and sky meet, where the grasses and waters are good neighbors. It slowed me down. I could smell the salt-fresh air. Tune into the quiet. Start to remember my own.
I look out into the inlet before me, where the moored yachts rock slowly and the contained water echoes back impressionistic versions of the white hulls and the masts. It is the very containment of the water that makes possible these gentler, slower ripples, the swaths of reflected color that float across the water’s surface.
And then suddenly, what has been roiling in me for the past few days bursts up to the surface as an unexpected question:
What is the point of writing a book, now?
Really? My whole work in the world, my whole purpose, up for grabs just like that?
One person spending months or years on a book, what is the point? Even if they give their whole self to it, how can that possibly be enough to turn a tide of power, greed, self-centeredness, and more? I’m just one person, just one wave in the sea, just one drop in the ocean. . . .
It was a moment of despair that I’d been trying to fight off. As if everything I’d given myself to for more than 30 years, my work helping people write the books of their true heart, would make no difference in times such as these. In the language of nervous-system regulation, I had dropped down to the nadir of the brain-body’s vagal system, all the way from well-being, with a stopover in fight/flight/freeze, down to at least the vicinity of collapse.
And then I remembered a book I’d read years ago (whose title and author I no longer recall). The author had wondered whether the most creative periods in history had anything in common. What had produced the human wealth of ancient Greece, for example, and the bursting brilliance of the Italian Renaissance? So he traveled to those countries and others, and talked with modern inhabitants to get their views. And the surprising conclusion he came up with was that all these creative birthings that we treasure (the art of Michelangelo and Da Vinci’s, new scientific ways of seeing the world, and more), long-ago contributions to humanity that still nourish us today, took place during tumultuous times.
Well, there is that. If the times are going to be tumultuous, perhaps people who are (somewhere inside them) inclined to create will surprise themselves with the power and beauty that make their way through them.
And then “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson called hope, fluttered slightly in my heart. Because I knew, both from personal experience and from working with my many book-writing clients over the years, that giving yourself fully to a genuine call to the creative is much, much more than only a personal gratification. It is that, but not limited to that. It is a bonding and a binding to the larger Self that calls us to be its messenger, to play some beautiful music-equivalent through us.
When we are able and willing to receive the presence of that which lives in us more deeply than any label we give ourselves—more than any story about our lives we've told ourselves, more than any identification with a narrow, egoic sense of who we are and why we're here—we experience our own Renaissance. We are reborn into what is possible for us, in us, and through us on a deeper, larger scale.
What if this is the underlying purpose of having a human life?
To truly be attentive to that which calls you from within—
to listen, to attune, to follow—
to backtrack when you realize you've led yourself astray—
and from that, to bring forth some meaningful, beautiful expression that can only come through you (even if the subject has been addressed by hundreds of others).
The expression doesn’t have to be a work of art. It doesn’t have to be a book. It can be a relationship, the balm of loving that never sees a public demonstration yet shapes a person whose being then radiates that love out into the atmosphere.
But it also could be some kind of a work of art. It could be a beautiful expression of what’s inside us, of what’s not yet known and what won’t be known until we give it a birthing space to make its way into the world through us.
What if this is a call to beauty on a massive-but-also-individualized level? What if the seeds of divine creativity implicit in our hearts have had the shock that breaks them open and push/pulls them through the bedrock and the soil to encounter an unexpected but ever-present light aboveground? To, in surprise and jubilation, sprout?
“In many seeds the embryo cannot germinate even under suitable conditions until a certain period of time has lapsed. The time may be required for continued embryonic development in the seed or for some necessary finishing process — known as after-ripening — the nature of which remains obscure.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica)
What if this is our sprouting time?
When we say yes to what calls us to create, we partake of an inherent life force that also partakes of us. When we say “Yes!” to what calls us to create (because it is ours to create), we add area, circumference, and ballast to that half of the balancing scale that leans towards life.
“I have placed before you life and death,” as the Old Testament puts it. “Choose life.”
Let’s.
If, for example, you have a book in you, let it be known to you. Open to receiving what comes to you to receive. Even if it's five words to start with, write them down as an act of faith that more words — good words — will follow.
Often people are led to view writing a book as a way to get something else to happen — customers to enrich them, interviewers to flock to them, and so on. But although this might be the result, you can write a book for the purpose of bringing forth life, of honoring your human contract, of becoming intimate with That Which Calls You to write it in the first place. This orientation, this intention, this love-longing, is also a way of choosing life.
Well! This was an unexpected place to arrive from where I had started.
I breathed and looked around me. The quiet inlet water and the roiling waves on the other side of the pier seemed less polarized to me, right now. It all was water, and the forms it took depended on things like surface and depth, openness and containment, spontaneity and attunement. I could seek to hold all of it. These were elements and directions available to me within my own breath, which itself was constantly available to me but not of my own making.
I was held. We are held. We can hold the vision of sprouting into the light.
Gratefully, I rose from the bench where I’d been contemplating all this, and walked in the direction of my car and home.
MY OFFERINGS
As a professional book developer and creative midwife with over 30 years in the publications field, I help bring about the conditions for you to write the book of your heart. I do one-to-one client work and also have some groups coming up in the new year. Gift Sessions are offered as, well, a gift. They're identical to client sessions except there's no cost or commitment. Contact me if this speaks to you in some way. If I can be of support to your creative thriving, it would be my privilege.
If you are called to write a book, I hope you will grace me with hearing your story and perhaps helping you to go further.
1. Individual book-development sessions:
I work with clients one-on-one, by Zoom or in person in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you are ready to allow the book of your heart to speak to, in, and from you in a way that feels genuine and enlivening (which will later resonate in just that way for your readers), click below to go to the “Work with Me” page on my website. If what’s there speaks to you and you feel ready, contact me and we’ll begin.
2. One way to get a sense of what it would be like to work with me is to book a Gift Session. This is the direct equivalent of a client session with me, at no cost and no obligation to go further. In this session, we will listen to your specific needs, desires, and creative ways, so that you get a deeper sense of your book’s path and natural ways for you to walk it. If, afterwards, you decide that you would like to work with me, we can set up a time and rhythm that works well for you. If not, we will both be grateful for the opportunity to have explored together, and you are likely to come away with a greater understanding of your book and your own creative ways.
To book your Gift Session with me, click the button below.
3. Writing from the Deeper Self Groups Coming up in early 2025
The Writing from the Deeper Self process of book writing is unique in that it gives deep and cherishing attention to the writer as much as to the writing. The following groups, slated to begin early in 2025, will feed you and your creative work in both ways.
Do you want to write your book but somehow you don’t get to it as often as you would like? And when you do, do you stare at your computer screen or paper, hoping you will have something wonderful to say rather than being in the flow of saying it?
I created the Co-Writing Sanctuary several years ago to give people like you a place to be energetically held for an hour a week so they could fully give themselves to their writing. So much of inspired, engaged writing depends on being able to shift consciousness from the ordinary to-do state of mind. In this set-apart time and space, people are given support, room, inspiration, and fertile silence to enter into the stream of whatever wants to be known through them as writing.
From the very beginning of each Sanctuary, you are welcomed into the sanctuary inside you with an esthetically captivating introduction — ethereal music, a beautiful image, an inspiring quote or meditation. Once primed, you get to write in silence for about 40 minutes in the privacy of your home and soul (with the option to turn your camera off). The time passes quickly when you are so immersed in what gives itself to your pen. At the end, I offer a Closure meditation so you can return to your regular life and yet stay connected to your internalized writing sanctuary.
“That was probably the best writing group experience I have ever had, and the most surprising feeling of sanctuary and grace. Your beautiful voice, wise words, kindness, and encouragement ... what an incredible feat you pulled off transcending technology, distance, and time to bring us together in such blessed energy.”—Jane Majkiewicz, writer, editor, former literary agency associate
More details on this will follow. If you’d like to know more about this group, drop me a line at naomirosedeepwrite [at] yahoo.com.
Don’t you sometimes wish there were a place to go during your long siege of writing a book on your own, where you could do preventive maintenance and plug into a stream of aliveness that would regenerate your energy and your confidence in writing your book?
The Book-Writer’s Wellness Clinic offers a place to come and recharge, renew, and to bring your specific concerns about your book-in-progress — whether about the writing itself or what’s happening inside you (your creative process), or both. Each time, a different writer will get to ask a question that I address in a way that, I hope, will speak to everyone present. Not a critique group, the Wellness Clinic is a time and place to come for guidance and reassurance, and to lose the loneliness that can accompany writing a book on one’s own.
More details on this will follow in the coming months. If you already feel moved to be in this group, you can drop me a line at naomirosedeepwrite [at] yahoo.com and let me know.
Thank you for reading my newsletters. I’m here to encourage your flowering.
Blessings,
Naomi Rose / Book Developer & Creative Midwife / www.naomirose.net