When You Begin Again

I have been writing for years..maybe encouraged by a little rhyming poem that my third grade teacher had me read in front of the whole class. And I was published at 18 in a small magazine with a story about my brother's amputation and how it affected faith. I've a mountain of journals, published two children's books, wrote about Alaska in the Sunday paper of the Alaska Daily News, been in a writers' group for nearly 20 years and have 3 long manuscripts on my computer. Yet at a retreat I led this past weekend on Writing Your Way Home, I had to face the exiled part of my writer self that has yet to write the thing that I hope and believe would fill the deep longing in my soul. There seems to be yet a part of my voice not yet explored..out of fear or discounting or the wildness of what it may be-- any of the other myriad reasons we do not trust what comes from that we do not yet know.
Two things will hold and support this new intention:
The first is the story from one of the participants at the retreat who had a mentor named John Bennett. This mentor (who was in turn influenced by Gurdjieff) told him that with new ventures into soul work, start with a 'passive do'--that is, 'do' as in 'do, re mi.." of the musical scale. The wisdom was that one must start quietly and slowly and move gently into the calling. The soul is shy and must be treated so. If approached with too much zeal and enthusiasm the intention can fade and we become disillusioned, when instead it needed more time. And I interpret the 'passive' nature of it to mean that we let it grab us, rather we grasp for it.

The other is a poem by Ranier Maria Rilke, a German poet that seems to have the words I need whenever I reach an impasse.
From his book, Love Poems to God, he writes,

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, O God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open seas.

The phrase 'May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children', gives me an image of the 'passive do'--and remembering of what that way was like as a child.
I hope these words feed you as you read them, and if in you, like me, you've always known there is something in you waiting to be freed, that you will begin to sing the first note of the musical scale, in a whisper, inviting more.