Pruning, Part 2

An open red rose, illuminated by morning sun | photo by Karen Miedrich-Luo

If truth be told, I wanted to unfriend many people screaming from across a great chasm, recently. At least plug my ears? I am a writer and words mean so very much to me, especially truth and what we do with it. Stuck in an ivory tower, supported by books and words and images, I need those people outside this narrow tower. Even if we don’t agree.

I need community.

As a writer, I need community not only to critique my words and sentences and ideas. I need input because when I air my messy thoughts, then listen to other opinions, I gain more than learning where my mistakes are.

One Saturday, last Fall, I attended writing craft workshops at two different venues. The morning session comprised of a group of local writers who meet once a month to share their work and offer constructive criticism. They are self-defined as Christian, though their writing may or may not be considered spiritual. The second seminar was a public gathering of people who paid for instruction in the craft of spiritual memoir.

The morning session began with prayer, scripture, well-chosen hymns that highlighted “story.” It was followed by a reading from A Light So Lovely by Sarah Arthur, about Madeliene L’Engle and her Christian faith. The group then discussed an essay by Flannery O’Connor (On the Novel and Belief) which laments the modernist tendency to subdue reference to active Christian faith, as if faith were something to be ashamed of. Afterward, we were asked to think about our writing goals, our frustrations, or simply comment on our current works in progress. The group prayed for me and my concerns and I left early.

Across town, the second group gathered. It was double the size and all were strangers to one another and the instructor. On the board she wrote the word Spiritual and the word Memoir. She then asked the class to define “spiritual” and I, still in a reflective frame of mind, decided to listen and observe.

Perhaps lulled by the congeniality and comraderie of the morning session, it simply never occurred to me that a definition of “spiritual” would not include God, or Spirit, or Soul, or belief, or religion. Those words eventually found their way onto the board by the teacher, after pausing for further comments. The communal words were: energy, intuition, being, awareness, universe, vibe, nature, elements, consciousness, inner dialogue. The words I had been thinking, like incorporeal, ineffable, sacred, or holy, could not be expressed because there was no context for these ideas outside of deity. 

I learned a lot from the instructor about craft and I heard many stories that expanded my worldview. And though holding those other ideas before me managed to create more space and new ideas, I did not find community.

I need more than someone appreciating or critiquing my words and ideas. I need community to stretch me beyond high and lofty sentences and challenge me to enter them, ask the hard questions:  What am I trying to say with them? Why are these ideas important? What do they mean, to me? Why do I feel compelled to share them? What is at stake? What is the ineffable and sacred thing I need to express? Despite my fear of conflict and opposition, I need to listen to contrary voices. I need people to spot the holes in my logic and help me see a different perspective, one that is not my own. But I also need community that recognizes where my creative source originates.

Ideas are often likened to fruit and fruit trees need pruning. We’ve had a stressful summer, a very hot one, without much rain. We watered our lawn religiously and our stand of pecans, cypress, oaks, and citrus seemed well. Then one day, a perfectly healthy, very large Pecan branch sheared right off from the weight of its massive green Pecan clusters. Even the smaller branches were loaded with them such that lifting the smallest branch weighed as much as a large bowling ball. I am familiar with pruning dead branches, but not healthy ones. The preponderance of fruit, ripening and growing, was too much for the tree. It is important to shed some of that fruit, to shave off even healthy-looking fruit to spare the whole tree the trauma of self-sacrifice. But I speak again of words. I must look at the whole tree.

I need community.

Community helps me see what I truly need to write. Community shows me how to prune away the good ideas I have for other things that are sucking away my ultimate goals. While following the Kavanaugh hearings, I got side-tracked and was so tempted to enter the fray, stand on my soapbox, and levy my vision of truth. I want my voice to count and to hopefully have an impact on society. But a few close friends helped me step back and consider those competing ideas. As I wrestled with my intentions, I realized that I do not want to write about policy or deeply held political ideas.

My longtime goal is to be a peacemaker, a bridge, a conduit of encouragement that crosses barriers. That is not to say I do not hold opinions, nor that I cannot voice them at the ballot box, or even online. But that is not currently my goal as a writer. I need to prune away the obvious conflicts, the ego, the largest immediate fruit, to protect the health of my tree and bear fruit for a different purpose. 

(This post originally appeared at Write/Create and is no longer available.)