Journey to Wonder:
The Yoga of Writing (and
Living) with Wonder
A state of wonder can crack open a thin-shelled reality. In wonder, we can feel reborn, hatchlings to this world and to this life gifted to us. Even, or maybe especially, in times of adversity and challenge wonder can awaken in us this life's fullest potential.
For writers, cultivating a state of wonder helps us keep our language fresh and vital, our plots novel, our characters surprising, and our writing practice and writing life itself perennially renewed. The work of Italo Calvino (fiction), Annie Dillard (nonfiction), Billy Collins (poetry), and a slew of others, both contemporary and classic, exhibit this terrifying beautiful state. Imaginative writing fills our soul’s goblet with wonder’s wine. With this wine on the tongue, we write the language of shadows, of hotel rooms inhabited by ghosts, of peonies disrobing before our eyes. We write with our moon tongue. To drink this nectar, our body, breath, tongue, and embodied imagination are our guide.
Writers can
find a guide to writing with wonder in the classic yoga text the Siva-Sutra-s.
This somewhat beguiling text describes a Sanskrit concept and state of
being called vismayo, which translates to "a state of joy-filled
amazement" or “a state filled with surprise and wonder”—a state we
can discover how to embody as part of our daily writing process and daily
writing life.
The Yoga of
Writing with Wonder can help us access surprising imagery and insight,
dwell in original questions, and keep our plots and poems surprising at
every bend. We can write from a source richer than, but not exclusive of,
the intellect. Learn more about The Yoga
of Writing (and Living) with Wonder Workshops.
To come on this
journey, you might start with your own Wonder
Log or join me at a
retreat, workshop, salon, or conference somewhere around the world
this year.
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