Writing as Spiritual Practice

     The poet Bill Heyen, at his recent visit to Nassau Community College, said that Emily Dickenson couldn't be pinned down to any particular ideology at any particular time. She'd write of her belief in God in the morning; by afternoon she was agnostic, by evening, atheist. Such is the poetic process; to an observer, we may be "trying to say" something, struggling with chaos and contradiction, when all the while we're simply sailing through images and metaphors, dancing to rhythms absorbed and expressed. We may find emotional "truth" in all of this, but that's where truth ends. All the rest is imagination--the stuff of ritual, prayer, and change.
My spirit is at home in language, and I'm most authentically engaged when writing poetry, creating rituals of comfort and contexts of meaning. The process of re-vision becomes an avenue of meditation where I am able to connect to parts of myself that have been severed or fragmented; where I find a source of support, goodness, and humanity. Writing is also ritual incantation: I open up space and swim through that space; breath deeply while marking and changing rhythms and patterns. I can explode into multiplicity or rest in the quietude of darkness. I have done this since I was a child.

     1955. I'm five years old. I've been playing piano since I was three and have fallen in love with the tick-tock of the metronome. The word "beat" is so much sweeter than the beatings I get from my mother when she's high on drugs. Today in my father's office I played on the electric typewriter. The rhythm is similar to the piano, but instead of music, out come words--words arranged into clusters, words that sound like song. Something inside me sings along and it sounds so beautiful, as beautiful as the inside of stones. You see, sometimes I take a little rock and smash it open with a bigger one; inside is the most exquisite world of silver mica, white crystal mountains.

    1962. Her name is Barbara Jane Lofrumento. Harvey, my doctor did an abortion on her and she died. He panicked and cut up her body; then he stuffed the parts down the garbage disposal. I am so sick and disgusted, I have sent my spirit into hiding to stay safe. I let her out only through poetry and music. She's very smart, and as strong as those stones I used to break open. She wants me to bear witness, to speak the truth, to bring to form that which has been lost, dis-membered and dis-integrated. I need to be able to imagine wholeness, to feel empowered, to live without threat. I want to speak for her but I'm scared. It helps to use symbols and metaphors; they reveal and conceal at the same time.

     1995. The title of my book of poems, In the Shape of a Woman comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich: “I am an instrument in the shape/of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images...for the relief of the body/and the reconstruction of the mind.” It's this process that brings amorphous shape to form, spirit to language. To become this instrument, I must be in touch with the rhythms of my blood, breath, and brain; with humanity, nature, and the cosmos. In a way, I must become the conventional "vehicle" through which creation, or a power greater than myself, moves. But when that power is linguistically marked as the masculine, universal "He," I become, as woman and a writer, split in half, screaming for my soul.

    2002. Embodied in "the image," any image, are the seeds of its own volition. All I need to do is translate rhythms into images, then let the image go, trusting enough to be carried along the process, changing and being changed. Surrendering to a process of such intensity and uncertainty is terrifying, and I often resist by refusing to write. But then my spirit, muffled and buried, demands release, and with faith that something good will come out of the process, I eventually let go.
Sometimes I see myself, a very old woman sitting on a boulder gazing out to sea, re-arranging constellations broken in the moonlight. Take out one star, replace it with another. Shift: line, branch, tree, arm, hand, breath, flesh: language, spirit, body: the same.
The seagulls are in flight and the ducks settle down into the dark, dark, earth.

Pat Falk, Nassau Community College, Garden City, New York Originally presented to Sophia Center Symposium on Writing as Spiritual Practice, Huntington, New York 2002, and published in “Conversations,” publication of the Sophia Center, 2002.