The Art of Dramatic Living

The show will be over this weekend. So it’s brainstorming day. Time to think about what comes next. This isn’t a process of decision making. It’s a process of opening to the possibilities. And it’s not a process intended to find the “next project”. It’s more of an internal temperature reading. A sensing of what form or forms of expression will move into forefront of my life.

I’m thinking – poetry, poetry, poetry.

I’m a bookstore prowler and a book lover. One of my favorite techniques for sparking ideas is to practice bibliomancy. Here’s how I do it:

I spend some time browsing my bookshelves and reading the titles.

Poetic Medicine
Fearless Living
Sylvia Plath – A biography
Attractor Factor
The Authentic Career
Live Your Dream
The Mind of Your Story
Writing Down the Bones

Eventually a book will feel like “the one”.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

I pull it off the shelf and hold it in my hands. Yes. This is “the one”.

The sub-title leaps off the book and tickles me a bit.

Freeing the writer within.

Yes.

I fan the edges of the book before I am ready to open it. This book is beat up and ragged. It’s darker around the edges and it smells dusty – like it hasn’t taken a breath in a long time. The edges make a noise when they fan past my thumb like rushing water far away.

Then I open it and the noise stops.

Page 45
Baking a Cake

I scan the page from top to bottom – reading quickly and returning quickly to the pieces that of their own volition speak to me in a way that is different from the rest of the page – sweetly or with urgency.

Today it is sweet:

When you bake a cake, you have ingredients: sugar, flour, butter, baking soda, eggs, milk. You put them in a bowl and mix them up, but this does not make a cake. This makes goop. You have to put them in the oven and add heat or energy to transform it into cake,…

I’ll sit with this for awhile. Write it in my journal. Copy it and copy it again. Then use my own words to explore it until I exhaust it. The part that is singing to me today is, “You have to put them in the oven and add heat or energy to transform it…”

 - add heat or energy to transform it -
 - add heat or energy - 
 - to transform it -
 - heat or energy -
 - heat -

Where is my heat and my energy leading me? What am I being pulled towards? Where do I sense the heat of my creative energy? What am I warming up to? Take my internal temperature and lead with that.

Wait a minute! Isn’t that where this post started? It is! This wasn’t planned. It’s bibliomancy. It’s a confirmation that I am listening to the right source: my heat. I am warming up to something new.

At the bottom of the page there are more words:

Katigiri Roshi said: “When you do zazen [sitting meditation], you should be gone. So zazen does zazen. Not Steve or Barbara does zazen.” This is how you should be when you write: writing does writing. You disappear:

So I will sit with this heat and let the heat do me. Let the heat do heat. Let the heat be.