have you found a space, that empty space...

Has she utterly lost her mind (and gained her soul) she's seriously writing curating things about space and alone and intuition and slow in the midst of this chaotic season? It's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride straight through January...surely anyone can see that?

The awen stirs through the trees: There is no time like the present. (And this isn't really about just women. It's the divine feminine in All.)

"But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?" - Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize Lecture, "On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

"Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal." - William Shakespeare

"Many women are sensitive in the way sand is sensitive to the wave, the way trees are sensitive to the quality of the air, the way a wolf can hear another creature step into her territory from over a mile away. This splendid gift of women so attuned is to see, hear, sense, receive, and transmit images and ideas and feelings with lightning speed. Most women can feel the slightest change in someone else's temperament can read faces and bodies- this being called intuition - and often from a plethora of tiny clues that coalesce to give her information, she knows what is on their minds. But it is this very openness that leaves their boundaries vulnerable, thereby exposing them to injuries of the spirit. "

"In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must temporarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude - to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women... Going home is sanity... It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation, and perspective." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, via As A Woman

"One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Enjoy this video on "how to" converse (etymology: turn together) with your inner teacher (video by Rysa5) below:
 

Art credits Morning Exercise III, by Bian Guo Qiang; photo © Ecological Center, of woman birdwatching in Russia on ecotour; The Golden Bough, by J.M.W. Turner; "The Way of the Real and the Inner Light" by Rysa5; high-resolution available here)

Comments

[Matt]

I believe more of our troubles start because people don't have "their space", their own time for their own purposes.

In the business area people's time and creative "space" tends to get very tight and restricted which, IMHO, leads to apathy and general lack of interest.

When this happens in our personal lives I believe it leads to depression, anxiety and hosts of other ailments.

We all need our own bit of space.

[Michael Pokocky]

I have declared my last post, the internet is dead+ on my blogs.
I agree with you that "space" my space of which I know very well and have been away from since I got on to the net five years ago.
I am free!
What a day and thanks Evelyn,
Michael
my url gives out my blogs and sites which I will leave for the way back machine. Glad I didn't decide to publish my books on the net. Going to send the first of 10 written to New York. Wish me luck.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Matt, Thank you. There is a reason I'm a bohemian bum, and not a corporate queen these days. Yet, I know folks with wads of time on their hands, and they can still "escape" from this spaciousness that I'll not even try to pin down in name. (TV, addictions, shopping, apathy, dropping out and sundry other mass distractions.) Some days I am that "folks" I speak of that escapes. Lack of time's an easy a target. I think of a Twitter friend today who wrote: "In third grade, Sister Rose told me constantly, "Look before you leap, ____." It's still repeated to me oftentimes today..."

I wrote back: "Just leap. The gap is the ground of your own being."

That is more the "space" I was aiming for in this post.

Michael, Corporate America. The Internet. Easy targets.

But the Internet, boy, oh, boy do I have a hard time keeping it real there. Don't know why. Yet, I've written some heartfelt emails. A few soulful haiku figments. The common factor: ME. Where was I that moment? Was I really present, was I really Presence?

Writing on the Internet is really challenging. But something tells me it's my medium. Maybe it's video - spoken word, street theatre storytelling, yet to explore. Blogging, though? Now, if only I could remember that writers don't need to be paper mill experts, nor study the nuances of mulching trees to make a page - if I can stay out of the "Internet" as an industry, and just simply USE it, period. I might have half a chance.

I think where the Internet as a medium (not Industry) shines is in sharing the very present. This moment. Not past, not future. Real-time. Uber-Zen. The challenge is we must meet it with our spontaneity, or it doesn't click.

Very good fore-tune to you (preferred to fickle luck)! I think there is more interesting things than even books or the Net coming down the pike for all that love baring their soul whether it be screen or page or voice or whoknows, and I can't wait. So I'm doing it, and, we're doing it. By experimenting, exploring...creating as we go...

[Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com]

This is a very deep post. I consider myself a writer but I'm not sure if I have successfully tapped into that space yet. The way you describe it, it's almost like a trance. Almost but not quite. And I happen to agree that women have this uncanny ability to be more sensitive to small gestures and changes in mood.