Writing as a spiritual ritual

“My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.” -- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

When I read this passage from Franny and Zooey as a high school student, a previously badly configured section of my brain booted up and I looked out the window at the yard and the children playing and the great wood behind the house and said, "yes!"

I cannot view the world without feeling that it and everyone in it are divine. Looking past what I see with physical eyes, I see swirls of energy. "Light" is a wonderful word for it. The world of form appears solid and real and I love it for it is beautiful and dear and provides experiences that are all part of the writer's journey--of everyone's journey.

Writing as a spiritual ritual connects me with the world beyond the physical. My sense of this is similar to a close-up view of an old newspaper half-tone where the very solid picture on the page is, at closer inspection, a sea of dots. This is easy to visualize now via the pixels in a digital photograph.

Sages and philosophers have told us that "all there is, is light." Writing, for me, is a connection to the light even when I'm writing my satirical "Jock Stewart" material or a quasi-mundane weblog post. But when my focus is on what I'm most passionate about, that connection is almost palpable. I am a being composed of photons holding a pen composed of photons pouring streams of photons--"I love you" "The stars filled the night sky" "Bob and Alice made love"--down upon a sheet of paper shimmering on my desk like a subset of the northern lights.

There is no separation here. Dualities and differences disappear. Races and cultures and religions and political viewpoints merge into a swirl of sparkling points of light, and it's all the same. There's nothing here that needs preaching about, no dogmas, no "my religion vs. your religion." Thinking of the world in this way is who I am. This is not to say that the words on the page are a prayer or an inspired gospel or a meditation, for that (to me) makes no sense.

What I feel as the words flow is a rhythm as sure and distinct as a shaman's drum and then the best of my words begin to come from a higher part of myself, the part who sees the light and the connectedness of all things. I write to experience that connection and the "inner knowing" that accompanies it.

As a writer, I live magical realism while I'm putting words on a page. The words may be variously badly organized, silly, pointless, boring, or covered with flaws I can't even see. Within the ritual itself, the words are the least important part of the process.

The process is its own reward.

When another writer tells me he had a wonderful writing session wherein his consciousness and his muse's consciousness were one and the same, I wonder if he felt that he was pure light writing with pure light.