Words from your Depths

I started writing when I was eighteen, many years ago. It must be remembered that I was thrown out if school for not conforming, and at the time I knew nothing about writing, nothing about grammar, about punctuation. My associations with those things were that in junior school a system of measurement was introduced showing who was ‘best’ at schoolwork. There were only three that were seen as having importance – the three at the top of the list. It is the same with the Olympics – just the three at the top, all the others who worked their asses of were forgotten in the hall of fame.

I don’t know how I worked it out, but it was all about getting you to conform to a standard set by others, a standard I wasn’t interested in. A war was on at the time and I am sure the part of the aim was to shape us into warriors.

So when I started my writing career my first effort was a solid page of text with no punctuation. It wasn’t that I was stupid because I learnt to read very early and sat for hours lost in the wonder of words, living the stories as only a child can do. So when I sent my effort to the tutor of the Fleet Street School of Fiction and Features, a postal course, I did not get criticism for what I had put effort into, instead I received guidance. I was told that writing was about expressing something you wanted to communicate to others, and I need to look at how others managed it. Being an avid reader I soon saw that it was about breathing in time with the pauses and full stops. And to slightly change the pace you used a new paragraph. I felt, why couldn’t they have said that at school instead of going on about rules, shoulds and shouldn’ts. It was really quite easy – so the next feature I sent in I sold.

Expressing something in a way others could understand – a very new concept for me.

There is however a difference between being able to communicate to others in way they could understand and being able to express from the very depths of ones feelings, what you deeply feel life has carved into you or what has seemed like something more and wonderful you have glimpse and long to share.

People may see that as creativity – which it is – and feel it is about writing poetry, painting or creating music. Well it could be, but in fact it is much, much more than that, for it is being able to realise who you are beyond fears, trauma, and gender hang ups, beyond all the social and educational programming most of us carry within and are victims of. In fact it is about coming alive, maybe for the first time.

What I realised as I emerged – slowly – from writing and selling my first feature was that I had inherited many internal filters, and to get rid of them would take work, courage and perseverance. Filters change the way you perceive the world and your own experience. So if I had a red filter and looked through everything I saw would have a red tinge and the colours would look very different. But the filters we have change the way we react, what we produce, and how we live our life.

One of the first filters that I came across was the fear of death. I know that is pretty basic in many of us, but mine was magnified because I was born dead, and my mother lived with the fear of me dying – which didn’t help. Also during anaesthetic while having a surgical operation I felt as if I were dying. What that filter did was to give me a fascination with death and dying and also am active fear. It also led me to write about death. See met death

But fear and anxiety are other filters, fear of being smothered, of being abandoned by a parent or lover, fear if not being adequate, of animals, fear of men or sex, fear of being discovered, fear of pain – just fear. But there are many other filters that many of us do not feel change our response to others and our experience; things like being dominated by any aspect of our instinctive or body functions like sex, hunger, emotional hunger for wanting a partner, being fixed in a ‘rational’ centred being or even being lost in a particular religious belief system and maybe also political beliefs. There are also social pressures acting on us that can act as filters too – for each and every belief which is seen as a fact or conviction acts as a filter.

This can be illustrated because we are all a life form striving to exist and that takes energy, the energy of our existence. Such energy can be blocked, diverted, split and expressed. So the filters act as partial or total blocks, and our ways of expression are therefore diverted or split.

Considering all the factors on the way of writing from our deepest self it is not an easy thing. Yet it has been done often by writers, artists or even architects. Think of the Great Pyramids, the Greek myths, the Shakespearian plays and even the ever popular Alice through the Looking Glass. In our own way we are capable of it but maybe in less spectacular ways. We can express it in living it, as many mothers do. We can catch glimpses of it and produce something new that yet expresses the eternal. But usually it takes a particular type of love, a certain way of life or a discipline that clears out the rubbish in the way of shining out the treasure of your depths. Sometimes it is because a person feels, sometimes from youth – which they have in them something to do or to live out. Despite many hard knocks and life experiences the feeling persists, and so that persistence is like a discipline that keeps them true to a message that they are often not clear of themselves. Despite being labelled by others – or even themselves – as a fool or failure they keep walking a road that has no promise or direction – except it satisfies a deep part of them.

It is not usually a path to riches or fame – but it a way to flower. Like a rose growing it would not be aware of where it is growing to or for. It simple keeps growing and it begins to see something different emerging, a bud. The bud becomes a rose – but even that is not what it is about, for it produces seeds and seeds are a continuation. A woman or man can also flower and produce seeds that will pass on to influence the world and generations.

If you feel any connection with what has been said see Meeting yourself