Pat Schneider is a writing teacher. She wrote a book called Writing Alone and With Others. She gives a lot of exercises to get you through blocks and difficulties. In one she says “start with an image.” She describes a process where “the disconnections are as important as the connections. One image triggers another and, like a person walking on large rocks across a creek where the water is fast and slippery, we will not get to the fifth rock that allows us to step onto the opposite bank unless we first step on, and then abandon, rocks one, two, three, and four. … The first image that comes may not be the treasure I am after.” p17 She describes a process of going from image to image until she gets to a story. So I gave it a try when I was feeling down.
from my journal for Sunday, October 2
Daily Good — “What is wanting to find expression through me?”
“He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower…”
“Myself it speaks and spells / crying what I do is me for that I came.”
It’s a jumble, mumble, stumble inside. Lines of poems, lines of songs. images? one of the parting of the waters of the Red Sea to let the Hebrews pass through…
the Promised Land.
The Beloved Community.
Kindred Spirits.
Something else that wants to find expression through me.
The Periodic Table of the Elements.
A self-consistent entity that can manifest as either a wave or a particle depending on how you look at it.
Walking out into the Quad to find everything shimmering.
“In the beginning there was hydrogen…”
How did the Universe get from the simplicity of a star to the complexity of a pine tree?Someone in Meeting talks about the variability of how we understand “God” among Quakers.
It occurs to me that “God” is a self-consistent entity that can appear as many different beings depending on who is looking.“Let the river answer that you’ve always been her lover.”
God can manifest as Caspar the Ghost or the Ocean of Compassion depending on what I’m open to…
Suddenly such a sense of love surrounding me.
Thank You, Great Being
After the class in physics that described wave-particle duality, I walked out into the Quad to find everything vibrating. It lasted for about half an hour, then everything went back to being solid.
“In the beginning there was hydrogen…” was the beginning of a chapter in my astrophysics textbook. My mind went on to “and the hydrogen was without form, and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep…” and I went on to write Genesis II.
How did the universe get from the simplicity of a star to the complexity of a tree? This question came to me as I was walking back to my dormitory after an evening spent looking at the Orion Nebula through a telescope. As a senior major, my job was to keep the telescope on the nebula while beginning students came in to draw it in their lab notebooks. The answer, which wasn’t even a concept in 1964, is self-organization.