Writing while the blue sand runs

 

 

When I approach a major writing project, I sometimes notice I have decades and decades of journals and drafts and sketches that hold relevant material. They are alluring but perilous. I can get trapped and enmeshed in them, like a tomb raider in an Indiana Jones movie when the roof of the underground temple starts coming down. I need to find how to get out of my self-made literary necropolis and write fresh words.

I often fall back on a practice I lead in all my creative writing retreats: timed writing.  I have found it's incredibly productive to tell people to do something in a very short period of time. When I say a short time, I mean five or fifteen minutes. I find that fifteen minutes is a terrific space in which to get something down.

For my own writing practice at home, I have a marvelous assistant. It is a quarter hourglass. It runs for fifteen minutes. I found it online. It has blue sand in it. Blue is my favorite color. Whether I feel ready or not, if I have fifteen minutes, I will upend the hourglass and start writing. This is especially good to do when I do not feel ready, maybe utterly uninspired. I write anyway. And I stop when the sand runs out. 

My hope is that I pretty soon I’ll be writing consecutively in these swift sessions so I may have the whole draft of a book, or at least a chapter or essay, if I keep doing this for a few weeks. I know that if my fingers go fast enough, as the sand runs down, there’ll be no time for my inner editor and my inner critics to take command of my thoughts. Some days I have no clue about what I am doing or what I want ti to come of this. That’s okay.  I write for that quarter hour anyway and sometimes something wonderful or terrifying or both breaks through – a bigger story that has been stalking me, the soul of a book I had not planned, a trickster spirit who wants to remind me that play is always the thing. 

While the blue sand runs, I do not look at those notes and digital files and piles of books and folders. I keep my eyes on the page I am writing, on paper or screen. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I'm not looking at old drafts or sketches. I'm not looking at my journals full of treasures though they are. I'm just writing. I might be drawing from my memories of things that have happened in my life and things that I've written about in some form somewhere else, but I'm not looking at anything. . I'm not struggling with the old furnishings of the mind. I'm writing while the blue sand runs.

I often say that creativity requires us to play first, work later. If you have heard me say that, you may object, “What if you don't feel like doing it?” My response is: however you feel before you get into the swim, doing something for fifteen minutes is no big deal. Make it a game. Play at writing, at being a writer. For quarter of an hour, do what writers do.

Have you heard what William Faulkner said to the wannabee writers who flocked to Ole Miss for the first and last creative writing workshop he ever gave? He looked at the eager faces in the lecture room and said, , "So you want to be writers?”. When the cheers had died down, he said, “So write." And he left the room. 

[from a guidance session I gave at a writing retreat] 

For a sample of raw product from one of my personal 15-minute sessions see "You are in the afterlife now"

 

 

In the treasure cave

On the shortest day of the year, I am down in my creative Cave, once more engaged in reading, transcribing and harvesting from my journals over many decades. There are fantastic dramas here, mythic trouble (and delight) and tremendous trans-temporal adventures in which sometimes I enter the situation of my counterparts in other times, and sometimes they join me in mine. We bring each other gifts and challenges, allies and adversaries from other times and other worlds.
     When I read a report of a dream or vision recorded long ago, it comes alive and I am often able to reenter it fully, and make sense of its nature and context with the benefit of what I have learned. Thus I am able to track continuous lives, being lived by my parallel and counterpart selves in other realities, remembered and recorded as dreams. From the viewpoint of those parallel selves, my life in ordinary reality is the dream, or the ghost trail.
     I feel sympathy and compassion as I monitor how younger Roberts tried to make sense of all this while lacking any really helpful mentor in this reality, and how they struggled to keep body and soul together on the roads of this world. I wonder, as I consider how “past” and “future” aspects of myself looked in on each other and sent each other mental texts, whether my present acts of observation are changing things in, say, 1987-1988.
     That thought quickens my interest in those journals that aren’t really old. I am in a treasure cave. But as in the Indiana Jones type of adventure where the floor gives way and the roof starts to fall when you touch a precious object, there are rather strict limits to how long I can safely remain in the cave, and how much I can bring out, on each visit. So I move softly and slowly, tiptoeing around the floor in a kind of hopscotch rather than plodding up and down, taking a little from the chest over there, then something from the one on the other side. A raven’s feather, an ancient treatise on the imagining spirit, a Celtic cloak pin, a flying carpet.

Solstice blessings!

Photo of Deinkuyu from buzzworthy.com

Commencement at Alma Mater

from last night's dreams:

I am walking across a campus with a host of people arriving for a big ceremony, something like commencement. I feel wonderful, young and fit and strong. 

    I am a young professor, no older than my early 30s. I am a celebrity, and the college kids are so excited by my presence. They look at me as if I am Indiana Jones. I am wearing well-cut “donnish” clothes – tweed jacket, slacks, shirt and tie. I consider the impact it will have if I turn up later for a lecture I am scheduled to give in a trench coat and broad-brimmed black fedora, which are also part of my wardrobe.

    There is special seating reserved for me in a vast auditorium.

    However, I first go to see a wise woman – wise beyond her apparent years, since she looks to be in her mid-thirties, a little older than my dream self. I present a card. It looks like a tarot card. It is brilliantly colored. The central figure wears a costume patterned in sky-blue and orange lozenges, with a big floppy Renaissance hat. He could be the Fool or the Magician, but I want to call him the Troubadour. The card glows in my hand, casting rays of light.

    When she sees the card, the wise woman reveals a whole set of cards. I am charged with excitement. This is the real deal. These images hold real codes of life and manifestation. I will consult them when I teach courses at the university, where I have been given a special, highly prized, appointment.

Feelings: Delight. I wanted to stay in this dream, and did so, despite the morning light spilling through the windows.

Bernart de Ventadorn

Reality check: The dream felt entirely physical. The body was definitely mine, but not the one I am living in right now. I was a very young professor (of ancient history) long ago at the Australian National University. This is a different college. The buildings are older, and the campus is larger.
    I work with tarot and have taught courses in "Tarot for Dreamers".
    I was introduced to Troubadour songs that spoke to me deeply when I was teaching in southern France earlier this month. One was from Bernart de Ventadorn, the meaning of whose surname ("Adorns the Wind") is already a poem. Another was from Guilhem de Peitieu, Count of Poitou ((1071-1127), who has been called The First Troubadour:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien....

qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen

sobre chevau.

I made this song from pure nothing...

It came to me when I was sleeping

on a horse.

    I cannot immediately identify the wise woman.
    I have seen myself teaching in a pleasant college in the afterlife in dreams and visions over many years.

What do I want to know?

-          Is this an alternate reality?

-          Is it a glimpse of a life I might inhabit after death, in an Alma Mater – School of Mother Soul – where I have seen myself teaching in dreams and visions over decades in this current life?

-          Does it reflect energy and presence I can claim right now?

-          All of the above?

Action: I will study the Troubadour song I was given. I will reflect on the significance of the combination of blue and orange. I may try to reenter the dream, talk to the wise woman, review the rest of the deck of cards, and find out what I am teaching at this nonordinary university.

Bumper stickers: 

1. Live in blue and orange.

2. Indiana Jones is a professor!

Indiana Jones leaves his jacket on the plane

I have just strapped myself into my seat for my first flight home from Seattle on Southwest when a flight attendant calls for our attention.
    "Is anyone missing a brown leather jacket. Looks like it's worth a few hundred dollars. We'll start the bidding at five bucks."
    This inspires chuckles but no claimant.
    "Let me read the label and see if that rings a bell," the flight attendant carries on. "Raiders by Peter Botwright."
     I know that name. I sit very still in my seat, wondering whether he is on a plane with me, again. Nobody claims the jacket. I relax a little, but my mind is back in a scene from ten years ago, when I met Indiana Jones on a plane.
     The details are almost incredibly specific, and personal.
     Back then, I was playing with an idea for a thriller that would involve time travel and jumping between parallel universes. A key plot line would unfold in Churchill's time, and would involve a group of magicians with access to him. The whole thing would be fast-paced and humorous, with Indiana Jones touches.
    Before I set off for the airport one morning, I put a question to the world. I wrote it down like this: "Should I write a thriller with Indiana Jones elements, involving Churchill?"
    My game was to receive anything unusual the world gave me, during my trip, as a commentary on my theme.
    My first flight was uneventful. But when I located the departure gate for my connecting flight, reality tilted. There he was, at the counter. Indiana Jones, in full rig - hat and jacket and Sam Browne belt and boots. This was really too much.  
    I was almost ready to pretend I had not seen him - until he took the seat next to me on board the plane. I put down the book I was reading, a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards.
   "Do you have the whip?" I asked Indiana Jones.
   "I've got it at home," he responded. "Listen, this is the real thing. It's authentic."
   "What do you mean, authentic?"
   "This is the genuine-article Indiana Jones outfit, as worn in Raiders. It was made by Peter Botwright. He creates costumes for the movies. He's a former bodyguard of Winston Churchill. Here's his card."
     Not the same former Churchill bodyguard who wrote the book I was reading. But another rhyme,
    Did I get a response to the question I had put to the world? You bet. What astonished me was how specific the response proved to be. I got the feeling that a production crew behind the scenes had crafted and custom-tailored this special moment with Indiana Jones, dressed by Churchill's bodyguard, on the plane.
    Did I follow the message and write that reality-bending thriller? Not yet, though I do have some drafts and files.
    I am not feeling pressure about this today, since Indiana Jones was not actually on my flight last night. Still, he left a marker. I was here.

After recent grueling travels, I was not looking for new adventures in yesterday's journey. Instead, I received winks and hints and subtle magic. A priest who took the seat next to me gave me his drink vouchers. Truly, life is a dream.

Indiana Jones jacket created by Peter Botwright's Wested Leather Company
    

Indiana Jones, dressed by Churchill's bodyguard

I fly rather a lot, in ordinary reality as well as in dreams. On average, in the course of a year I am on four different planes every week. One of the things that sustains me is that I am constantly having "chance" encounters that often prove to have rich story value, and sometimes give me messages from the world. This is the story of one of my all-time favorite encounters with a stranger on a plane. I have lifted the narrative here, unedited, from my journal. There is a polished version in the Introduction to my book The Three "Only" Things.

January 6, 2006

Indiana Jones, Dressed by Churchill’s Bodyguard

I dreamed that the poet Yeats – a frequent presence in my mind when I was writing The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead - wanted me to dress in a decent suit because he was taking me on a visit. When I was correctly dressed, he led me through St James's Park in London, past the swans, and eventually to Number Ten Downing Street, where he left me to have a private moment with Churchill, who seemed to be engrossed in receiving information on the telephone relating to the magical battle of Britain.

The dream excited and intrigued me. Subsequent research – studded and guided by coincidence – led me to understand that Churchill was deeply interested in the occult and in alternate history. I had always admired Churchill, and I now felt drawn to study him and to write about him. In my imagination, I played with an idea for a fact-based novel with some “Indiana Jones” touches, in which Churchill and his personal network – including one of his bodyguards – do battle with Nazi occultists, among others.

Since I had several other book projects on my desk, I decided to seek a “second opinion” on whether this book plan was really a good one to pursue.

As is typical any week of my year, I had another plane trip coming up. I decided that whatever came up during this trip would be guidance on my theme. To make sure there was no vagueness or confusion about that theme, I wrote it down on an index card:

I would like guidance on whether writing a novel about Churchill with an Indiana Jones flavor is a good idea.

On the first leg of my trip, I had an interesting companion, a woman who had recently decided to make radical changes in everything that was central to her life. She had left her husband and her job, sold her home and her furniture. After spending two weeks with a friend, she was now traveling back to an uncertain future. I suggested to her that “if you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there.”

I asked her to reach down deep inside and tell me what she wanted of life.

She began to talk about an old dream, of founding a center in her home town that would support women who had been abused or simply defeated by life and help them to find their voice and their power and their healing.

I asked her to take me there – to help me see and smell this center, to go there with all of the senses. She warmed to this task, and soon we were both there, in her dream center. She realized as she described the neighborhood that she now had the address – an old building in need of TLC – and that she had identified all the key players, including the financial sponsors, who could make this happen.

When we parted company at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, she was juiced and confident.

But she held my arm for a moment and said, “What do I say to that part of myself that’s going to rise up and say, It’s just your imagination?”

“You’re going to say what the poet Tagore said – The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

This was a pleasant exchange, and I like to believe that the center we grew in the imagination now exists. But there was no definite guidance here on my very specific theme, about the Churchill novel with an Indiana Jones touch.

Now I am hurrying along the C concourse at O’Hare, dodging electric carts and milling crowds, heading for my departure gate.

I stop in mid-stride because at my gate is….Indiana Jones.

He has the whole kit: the hat, the jacket, the Sam Browne belt, even the canvas dispatch case. Everything except the whip and the gun.

He does not look like Harrison Ford, however. He’s considerably chubbier.

And while I am thinking this may be my sign, a part of me is also saying,  This is absolutely over the top. Just too much. Don’t trust this.

So I get on my plane telling myself the verdict is still not in on the theme I have proposed to the universe. I settle down to my in-flight reading, which is a copy of The Duel, a masterful study of the personal contest between Churchill and Hitler in the critical months of 1940 when Britain and her Commonwealth stood alone against the Nazi evil. I had just gotten to a page describing Churchill driving with his bodyguard to Number 10 on the day he became Prime Minister when Indiana Jones loomed over me and said, “I’m sitting next to you. I swapped seats with a guy so he could sit with his family across the aisle.”

I made room for Indiana Jones, noting that it is always interesting to track what is happening when seating plans (or other plans) are scrambled.

“Do you have the whip?” I asked Indiana Jones when he was buckled up.

“It’s at home,” he explained.

“How about the gun?”

“Got that too.” He knew about guns, he explained. He was in the Coast Guard, working Homeland Security.

He thumbed his shoulder belt and announced proudly, “You know, this is the real stuff. It was made by Churchill’s bodyguard.”

“What did you just say to me?”

“These clothes were made by Peter Botwright. He used to be Churchill’s bodyguard. He went on to make clothes for the actors in James Bond movies, and then in Indiana Jones. I’ll give you his website. You can see for yourself.”

I showed him the open page of my book, where my finger had come to rest on a line describing Churchill in the car with his bodyguard.

“That’s quite the coincidence,” said Indiana Jones.

“You have no idea.”

Postscript

Did I write the adventure with an Indiana Jones flavor? Not yet. But I feel the play of the shelf elves in the way this 2006 journal report popped up just now. A smart editor I know once said that if a story is really worth telling, it will come back to the teller, after years or even decades....