(A Tibetan Rinpoche) gently advised, “Dedicate. Before you write and after you write, make sure to give it away.” …For writing practice to be complete, we must give it away: the effort, the results, and identification with the results. Much of the happiness that total absorption in an activity brings is nullified by the belief that it is ours – that we know what we are doing. But anything we hold onto causes disharmony.
Dedicating your writing and your efforts to write resituates your primary intention within a larger context. You become a vessel through which creative spirit flows. Without this resituation (letting-go), one leaves tracks.
Gail Sher, One Continuous Mistake
It is true of all things, big and little. Give it away and watch it soar.
Each year I pick up what was given away by a Nobel Prize Winner in Literature. This year is Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, the story about a young girl’s life on a farm in Africa. I give myself the whole year to read it, word by delicious word, savouring the gift as if it is a deep, dark, delicious sweet. This is the opening paragraph. A gift to you.
Two elderly women sat knitting on the part of the veranda which was screened from the sun by a golden shower creeper; the tough stems were so thick with flower it was as if the glaring afternoon was dammed against them in a surf of its own light made visible in the dripping, orange-coloured clusters. Inside this coloured barrier was a darkened recess, rough mud walls (the outer walls of the house itself) forming two sides, the third consisting of a bench loaded with painted petrol tins which held pink and white geraniums. The sun splashed liberal gold through the foliage, over the red cement floor, and over the ladies. They had been here since lunchtime, and would remain until sunset, talking, talking incessantly, their tongues mercifully let off the leash. They were Mrs Quest and Mrs Van Rensberg; and Martha Quest, a girl of fifteen, sat on the steps in full sunshine, clumsily twisting herself to keep the glare from her book with her own shadow.
The external obstacles of practice may be numberless but the internal voices of the critic, the trickster, the false friend, the colluder, the enabler, the fearful are legion. Some derive their power from their historical presence, some from an insidious compassion, and some from a voracious feeding off our fear, desire, and confusion. We aren’t used to naming these because for the most part they are deep physiological sensations and also because the experience is a lightning flash with little time to fit words to it.
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