Ready for spring?  We are.  We hope this issue of "Moving Muse" gives you - writer, artist, journaler, cook, all-around creative being - vital resources for deepening your connection to earth and to others. 

• "Tracking Wonder" and "Earth Writer" Tips

• A new "Muse It" forum for your writing

• Inspiring quotations & reading suggestions

• And lots of brand new courses, retreats, and workshops

Block Island.  Connecticut.  Taos.  The Hudson Valley.  Cape Cod. 

Here we come! -Jeff
 

 Tracking Wonder & Earth Writer Tips

• Rather than sit down to write with a focus on, "What do I have to say or to write?" try stepping outdoors and saying, "What is asking to be said or to be written?"  Then listen.
• Make a random mark on a page.  Then center yourself & take stock of where you are at this moment in relation to this building and to this part of the planet.  With this awareness, make a mark.  Then step outdoors and listen to something outside of yourself.  With this awareness, make a mark.  Observe any differences - without judgment - in your marks.  Then decide if awareness outside of yourself might alter your creative tracks on the page. 
  • Write like a butterfly.  Write like a bee. 
  • Use both sides of your rough drafts for print-outs. 
  • Watch a stream, steady and yielding.  Write likewise.
  • Don’t take yourself too seriously or too lightly.  Earth’s constant shifts remind us we won’t be here forever. 

Coaching Tip:
Feel the Verve of Your Words
Words on the page can have verve.  "Verve" is the vitality and energy that often give written words voice.  Where there's verve, we the writers and the readers feel connected.  The words have blood.  They're alive, we might say.  In Sanskrit, we call this quality of body, mind, and imagination virya.

Sometimes, though, no verve, no voice.  No voice, no connection.  Just a string of words routinely rout on the page's blank lake.  We might randomly cast words somewhere out there hoping something will catch. Chances are, little will.

You might reread something you've written and hear sentences or whole sections that lack energy.  "I don't feel connected to the words here," some writers tell me.  If you don't feel connected to your words, your readers likely won't, either.  What to do?

Each writer, each situation differs, of course.  But based on my own experiences as well as my work with numerous writers with variations of "verve ailments," I'll offer these suggestions for when you think parts of your writing or your writing in general lacks vitality.

* If a story's narration falls flat on the ears, walk the voice.  I asked one fiction writer-client recently to walk in the rhythms of his narrator.  I knew the client walked his dog each morning, so while doing so he would imagine being in his main character's body and feel the rhythms of his character's physical and mental and emotional movements.  The idea was to shake the client loose of engrained syntactical patterns.  It's starting to work. his drafts have voice where once there was little.  If a writer lacks fluidity with the ways words can string together tiny symphonies in sentences, then his writing's vitality almost inevitably will wane.

* Read the section or a whole piece aloud.  Doing so can help you hear how stuffed certain sentences can become or where a train of long sentences needs a compact one to break the tempo. 

* When you draft, try tending to sound as much as sense.  Doing so can lead temporarily to overwriting that sounds like a school kid who's just discovered alliteration, but doing so also can remind you that words' sense hinge as much if not more so on sound than on semantic reference. 

* Treat writing - and rewriting - words on the page as an experience.  Too often, writers whose words lack verve think that "their" words' job is to convey some memory or to translate some internal experience or emotion.  That attitude suggests that writing itself is not an immediate experience, only a secondary act trying to imitate best it can the "original" experience.  We wonder, then, How do writers "recreate" the feeling of that memory or experience?  They don't.  They don't try to "recreate" anything.  They create something new right there on the page.  That is, when they write, they tend so readily to the dance of imagination and words as fingers peck the keys and as respiration keeps the fleshy machine moving that the moment of writing itself - even if the "subject" ostensibly is a high school memory - becomes an experience.  When writing itself becomes an experience, regardless of subject, then verve more likely will visit.

* YOGA AS MUSE: FEEL THE VERVE OF YOUR WORDS - Center yourself and set the intention to write with verve.  You might have a particular subject or scene or character or memory with which you're working, but your aim is to treat writing as a vital experience.  Move in your body with vitality, with virya.  Sun salutations, exhilarating back arches, or even a few forward bends attentively executed can help you feel vigor pulse in your muscles.  Imagine your body as the body of work, the body of words.  Ten minutes, no more.  With your fingers literally pulsing, begin writing into the most salient concrete image.  Listen to the sounds and cadences of words and phrases that ebb and flow, and for now don't pin in the playfulness.  Let the words' energy carry you instead of you trying to carry - or drag - the words.  

The guidelines are simple.  Email submissions of 500 words or less focused on our topic of the month to ron@centertopage.com.  Clarify which theme you're responding to.  Keep submission within email textbox.  No attachments.  Include a two-sentence bio, email address, and location where you live.  We reserve the right to edit for length.

"Muse It" Theme for April: Earth & Writing: What do you do to remind yourself as a writer or artist to connect to the natural world?  How does the natural world inform your creativity even if you spend most of your days in subways and offices?  What yoga tools connect you and your creativity to the natural world?  Send us your musings, anecdotes, and suggestions.

 Possible YAM Online Listserv Forum
We've had requests from around the country to resurrect the YAM Listserv so you can further network, share ideas, and even form regional YAM groups.  If you'd be willing to help us design and moderate such a listserv, let us know.  Perhaps we can work out some simple trade.

• Jeff's Reflections:
  Writing as an Act of Earth
  
   

  I recently returned from Taos where I led some talented, authentic writers through a week's retreat.  If a retreat is the soul's winter, then to be in the world, fully and whole, must be the soul's spring. 

  Earth around here had its deep slumber, however briefly, but most of the snow from last week's blizzard already has receded beneath the soil and back to sky.  Earth prepares us. 

  I'm ready.

  Thank goodness for Yoga.

  Yoga, simply put, is a way to be in this physical world and in this creative body with full faculties, wits, and spirit.  Yoga awakens intuition, imagination, and other subtler facets of mind.  When these faculties arise over the mind's machinations, we may be more likely to feel a thawing pond's surge as it cracks its layers or to heed a hawk's swoop as it passes over traffic.  In these ways, Yoga also fine tunes our relationship to earth. 

  As writers, as creative beings, we might do well to refine this integral connection.  For what is writing's source but in our ancient interactions with this natural world of matter and spirit?

  * * *

  Writing as Wen

  What would writing as "wen" feel like?

  "Wen," a Chinese way, a term, relates to paw prints in the sand, to the tracks birds make in air on a spring evening, to the way stars line up and the way clouds cross their paths on a winter night.  "Wen" relates, too, to how we read these marks and tracks.  And "Wen" also references the act of writing itself.   

  How is writing, with no mysterious or mystical overtones, simply part and parcel of what earth does each day and night?     

  "A," the triangular alpha shape that arrows toward the sky, likely stems from a human's pictographic representation of an ox head.  "M," that mountain-like wavy form that comes smack in the alphabet's middle, stems from an early human representation of water. 
   

  These letters, part of the writer's implicit medium, come from our imagination's engagement with earth, with the physical world.  It's so simple, so obvious that these marks should have their history in this relationship where imagination grooves with earth's things.  Still, that fact fascinates me.  It also has led to a few years' worth of wondering how the act of writing itself is part and parcel of what earth does.
   

  3,800-year-old pictographs recently discovered and deciphered in a cave near what was ancient Thebes, these marks likely designated a hired Semitic assassin's rank, name, and prayer to a deity.  Our medium's earliest markings - inscriptions on cave walls that supplicate our connection to what is and our affirmation, "I was here."

  -J E F F

  Earth, Wonder, Writing Quotations "Not to live in the physical world is the greatest poverty." - Wallace Stevens "Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. . . .Language is learned in the house and in the fields, not at school.. . . " -Gary Snyder, The Practices of the Wild  "Certainly all my favorite writers have retained their attitude of wonder.  And I think this matters to me most about writing,        beyond history and politics, plot and structure, the literal and the symbolic.  Of course one wants all those things, too.                  But there is something much more primitive and simple and elusive that lies at the core of writing that has to do with the           sheer mystery of the created world.  For me it is what links a cave painting to a page of Ulysses.”                                      -Jonathan Rosen,  The New York Times “Also, I am learning that writing is a long journey.  Even in these times of modern travel, a journey can be full of                         surprises, unpredictable and fraught with danger.  Delays, handicaps, deceptive companions, and tantalizing distractions.         One’s mettle is sorely tested in this process.”  Sindiwe Magona, “Clawing at Stones”  “To find yourself, look outside yourself.” –Marvin Bell  "Do you remember how marvelous a stranger’s house smelled when you were small?  That’s another mark of genius,                 the senses are keenly and finely tuned.  How to hold on to that native genius and also learn the things we need to                     know to survive.  How to hold on to the breadth of genius and still narrow it down enough to concentrate on one piece                of work.  How not to allow the narrowing to become more important than the whole.  These are big problems.                               I’m thinking about them all the time.  How not to let the world de-genius us, our children and our grandchildren and our         friends.”  -Ellen Gilchrist, Falling through space  “Genius is the capacity to retrieve childhood at will.”  -Charles Baudelaire in an essay on modern art in the late 1800s  “[W]hat allows genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite, ‘ego strength,’ meaning (among other things) ordinary,     Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”                                                             Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints  "Metaphor is genius.” – Aristotle, Poetics

  Center To Page Book Picks   Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon 2007) by Joan Acocella.  At last an intelligent series of biographical essays of artists that collectively challenge the image of the brilliant artist as a neurotic basket-case.  There are a few such artist portraits in this collection, granted.  Yet, Acocella's practical, perceptive account for the role that  fortitude and "the ability to be disappointed" play in the creative life are worth the price alone of this volume.  And I quite like a collection that puts Mary Magdalene in with Susan Sontag.   Catching the Big Fish: Creativity, Meditation, and Consciousness (Tarcher 2006) by David Lynch.  The maker of such eerie       flicks as Blue Velvet and Eraserhead offers a few simple, sometimes illuminating meditations on how his 32 years of Transcendental Meditation have aided him in netting the "big" creative ideas.  Lynch's metaphors of the pond and fish help        us  us understand layers  of consciousness, but the book is otherwise slim on practicalities.  The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe (Metropolitan Books 2007) by Michael Frayn.  This playwright            and novelist turns his attention to matters philosophical.  I've barely cracked the cover on this promising volume.  Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (Columbia UP 2007) by Alan B. Wallace. So far,         the first two chapters offer a fairly useful argument for why subjective studies of consciousness with Buddhism's rigor              should be included in "scientific" studies of consciousness.  Wallace's argument should be useful for the slew of                       new branches of Western psychology, archaeology, phenomenology, and neurology whose practitioners increasingly               are investigating other states of consciousness besides Freudian neurosis.  The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Snow Lion 1998) by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.  As part of my tracking wonder               in the night world, this book illuminates in fairly clear language some "dream practices" I have been trying for several              weeks.  It's aiding my ongoing study of how the waking world and dream world converge and communicate.   One role,              as creative beings, might be for us to learn more about navigating dreams at noon and waking at midnight. Tooth and Claw (Penguin 2005). T. C. Boyle.  One of my clients, who studied with Boyle, turned me on to this brilliant          collection of short stories. In many of the stories, Boyle exhibits qualities of writers I admire: embodied compassion that         allows him to give voice to a variety of characters; embodied syntax and organic if not wild metaphor; a natural                    construction of scene and narrative arc; surprising phrasing that does not get in the writing’s way.  The Dying of the Trees (Penguin 1995).  Charles E. Little.  I read passages from this book intermittently to help me               communicate to the ailing spruce, maple, and willow on our land.  One role, as creative beings, is for us to keep attuned        to the more-than-human languages around us.

  JOIN THE WONDER: Upcoming Events
  Block Island Poetry Project: Earth Tongue, Earth Medicine, Earth Stories, April 12-15, 2007  REGISTER NOW
  Connecticut: Yoga of Writing with Wonder Weekend, April 27-28, 2007
  Hudson Valley: Creative Feast: A Cooking & Writing Adventure, June 16  BRAND NEW for OUR INNER CHEFS
  Hudson Valley:  WEN Barn & Farmhouse Workshop & Class Series: May-August, October
  Taos Writers Conference: Borderlands: Writing, Yoga, Consciousness, July 8-13, 2007
  Cape Cod Writers Conference: The Yoga of Writing with Wonder: From Inspiration to Re-vision, August 24-28, 2007

  Gratitude
  Your enthusiasm, courage, and utter tenacity to create with authenticity keep us at Center To Page moving. 
  Thank you.  Stay in touch, Jeff