EVERY YEAR around this time when I sit down to do the Writing with Rox calendar two months into the year, I find myself wondering why in the world I can't just sit down and decide which workshops to offer. If you're like me, every idea creates another one.
If you're like me, and also happen to be a bit handicapped by your creativity or "go with the flow" ways of life, you aren't great at marketing yourself. If you're like me, thank God you have amazing students who word-of (spoken word)-mouth you up and down their communities, which is one of the main ways you get people to show up for your classes and workshops.
If you're anything like me, you let your creativity sabotage practical matters; you compromise a complete coherent sentence in order to indulge a bit of wordplay, you spend hours contemplating the most creative workshop or retreat possible, only to find yourself two, maybe three or four months late getting the info out there for the people.
"What really strikes me about what you're saying is that 'writing is enough,'" my very wise, cool, dear, dear, ninja colleague, student, soul-sister and me-in-other (better)-form friend told me last week when I was lamenting my stuckness.
And, if your'e like me, sometimes it's hard to have faith in your truth.
I looked up from my fruit salad, for tropical fruit salad is a must when you spend the morning tobogganing your car to Cub, given the mile-high drifts. Oh no, I thought, is she going to jump on this "you are enough" campaign? Not that I don't go for that, but I was needing a little something beyond my own advice coming back to haunt me, which in that moment resembled contemporary psychobabble gone feral via the cliche highway, lost with words like "mindfulness" and "the present," and other sacred teachings that lose their meaning in the drone of the masses.
(Okay. You want an example? One time I was teaching a yoga and writing retreat and this woman goes "before I started doing yoga I might have missed the early morning frost on the trees," referring to one of the teachings in Matt Sanford's Waking, which emphasizes that we experience a lot of "you just missed it," moments when we are too busy looking for "perfect" moments. She may have caught the frost on the trees, but she missed everything else, point being that it's all here now: not the beautiful sunset, but also the "ugly" one; not the deep conversations, but also the "shallow" ones; not that big moment, but also this little one: it's all the same moment, folks. Our judgments over what makes a moment missable or not are what keep us separated from the riches and intimacy of the present moment. Contemporary, Junk English, by no fault of its own, can erode the essence of communication by touting certain things in extremes, is my point. The well intended spiritually seeking yoga woman was only half getting the point about "missing it" that the author intended.).
That said, I fear that "I am enough" is beginning to lose its essence and giving folks the sense that they don't need to work on themselves anymore, myself included. So what good is a workshop called Writing is Enough? Sure, writing is enough, I am enough, you are enough, but how does that translate into a workshop? As it was, I was feeling pretty defeated that it was coming on March and I still have 2013 fliers all over the Twin Cities. "Sure," I said, "I can think about that."
But she continued. "I mean, you're basically saying it doesn't need to be anything more than that for people to come together and write because that in itself is more than enough." She was referring back to what I'd said earlier in the conversation about always feeling like I have to sell the writing process by offering certain guarantees, objectives, insight, outcome, etc, all of which occur naturally within the powerful experience of writing together in community. "Why do I spend so much time doing the sales pitch when the act of writing together is more than enough?" I'd complained. I'd known this to be true for years, but somehow always came back to the need to add more more more, contributing, I fear—or at the very least supporting—the destructive forces of our dysfunctional "go! go!" world.
I ran the whole thing over in my head. All the way up until the part where she said, "...what you're saying is that writing in itself is enough."
"Oh.... that kind of 'enough'," I said, suddenly clicking into alignment. How could I have missed it? Well, I was looking for something else. Something bigger and better instead of what was so clearly just here.
"Yeah," she said, smiling that patient knowing smile, "that kind."
Is writing enough? How so?
And/or what sort of workshops would you like to see here at The Beach?
As always, thanks so much for sharing and I hope to write with you soon! xoxoxo
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