For the past several months I’ve been taking a creative and hypnotic writing course with Dr. Sophie Nicholls, a lecturer/professor at the Universities of Sussex, Leeds, and York in the UK, pioneer and expert on hypnotic journaling and using creative writing for therapeutic use, and general creative muse.  It’s been an amazing course to say the least, and since I’ve been focusing my writing energies there (and on a couple of other things) I haven’t really been putting too much thought into blogging lately.

Recently, though, I decided to share some of the things I’ve written in that class.  And today, appropriately, we will start with something I wrote about writing itself.  :)

This being a course influenced by hypnotic writing, I find that inspiration often comes right at that half-waking moment when I am in a state similar to hypnosis.  Often the piece will be fully formed, and just as often it will be like a thread, and once I start pulling that thread, the piece just seems to write itself as I discover just how deeply the thread goes.  This particular piece came right as I was drifting off to sleep the night after our class did a conference call, on which we had been discussing things like critical appraisal and editing of our writing versus the value of therapeutic writing in and of itself - the act of making versus the product being made.

And so, here is “A Midnight Poem About Making:”

For some,

The pen bleeds across the page

An inky catharsis,

A bloodletting go

Others see a pencil

Dancing across the paper

Describing a florid world

Full of life and beauty

And there are those

For whom the pen drags

Scraping slowly in fits and starts

Scratching out what is judged not good enough

For me it is a nib

Gliding on each line

Like a jet ahead of contrails

Gilding my thoughts upon the page

Or a fury of keystrokes

Tap tap tapping

As my fingertips

Prod the cursor along at lightning speed

But no matter how

The thing is made

Who am I to judge

The maker or the thing?

Is not the making valuable

In and of itself

If that which is made

Is not war?

There is something to be said for fineness

And for skill

But utter abandonment and transparency

Have their value too

And sometimes

It is the act of making

That is even more important

Than the thing that is made

I once saw a bonsai

That was already old

When it was given to Lincoln

By the nation of Japan

Astonishingly beautiful

And stately too,

It was a living masterpiece

Of wood and leaf and history

But did the timelessness

Of that masterpiece of trees

And the care and skill

It represents

Make a sapling on the forest floor

Any less of a miracle?

Any less a thing of beauty?

Any less deserving of praise and awe?