BREATHING UNDER WATER - BY CAROL BIELECK

​I built my house by the sea.
Not on the sands, mind you;
not on the shifting sand.
And I built it of rock.
A strong house
by a strong sea.
And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.
Good neighbours.
Not that we spoke much.
We met in silences.
Respectful, keeping our distance, 
but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.
Always the fence of sand our barrier,
always, the sand between.

And then one day,
- and still I don't know how it happened -
the sea came.
Without warning.
​
Without welcome, even.

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand
like wine,
less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.
Slow, but coming. 
Slow, but flowing like an open wound.
And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning
and I thought of death.
And  while I thought the sea crept higher, till it
reached my door.
And I knew then, there was nether flight, nor death,
nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling you stop being
neighbors 
Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors
and you give your house for a coral castle,
and you learn to breathe underwater. 

I believe that our writing intentions and our explorations (curiosities) in life are about a desire for wholeness, for completion.  Life is not a worthiness competition. Life ultimately ends the same for all of us. (Spoiler alert: we all die). On the first day of my Social Work class through the UW, I write this on the board: "You have nothing to prove and everything to learn (and share)." Just so. In our writing and life -- nothing to prove. Everything to learn and share. Everything to explore. 

Our curiosity acts as our gills. Our curiosity gives us the ability to breathe under water and to be present with what is. Our curiosity, without pressure to figure things out a certain way, takes us to where we want to be.  As we write and explore we will discover what we need for this moment. 

Sometimes we are hit by that ocean, whether it be a loss of a dear friend, an addiction, a betrayal, an aloneness, or some other trauma or disappointment. And when we stay with it, be with the experience, write about it, we learn how to breathe underwater. And so will your readers.

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​

Here’s what I know:  When (not if) you find your way to the page in a consistent manner this transformation will show up on your page. Whether you write poetry, fiction, autobiographical fiction, creative nonfiction, blogs or memoir.  
   
Whatever stops you from taking your world to word translates into what prevents every-day people from being transformed and taking action based on your writing. That’s what makes writing so transformative for the writer and the reader. 

Whatever comes up for you in your life can be part of your writing experience. When you allow your personal experience to be transformed on the page, through your writing, the reader is then given a transformative experience. 

Write about the denial, the fear, the loneliness, the joy, the questions, the encounters, the disasters and disruptions. Write about what you lost and how you found it. 

Take notes on your life. 

The thing that stops you from writing is likely offering up the most transformative dynamic for you and the reader. 

​So, what's stopping you from writing? Not enough time? Some secret doubt? Don’t feel the heat of the urgency? You wonder, "So what and who cares?" In the big scheme of things, does this matter? I will upset my mother, my sister, my neighbor, the spirit of my father. I won't make a difference; I won't make any money; I won't get published. I don't trust myself. I don't trust the reader. I'll be rejected.  Did I mention, so what and who cares?

Imagine working through these on the page. When you do, you will be transformed. You will have moved through the fear, doubt, and resistance, and importantly, so then will your future reader. I write about what I’m working out too. And when I meet up with resistance or any of the other myriad of hindrances, writing through them translates to a stronger, clearer message for my readers.

 What’s stopping you? . .  whatever it is, get it down. Face it on the page. And watch your world transform.
​

I will be at Sjolinds this coming Tuesday September 17th to write and to meet-up. Join me between 9 and 1:00. I'm available for free consultations on your writing. 

Want some one-to-one help with your writing? I'm available for individual Sherpa-Mentoring and Sherpa-Coaching. 

“Every day, think as you wake up: Today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.” – His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

I started my memoir about 8 months ago. Then put it aside. Then I picked it up again, and then, set it aside. Much like writing my novel . . . this experience could take decades. That's Okay. Writing takes as long as it takes. Then again, how much time do I have to finish this book? The clock is ticking (can you hear your own?); days are passing, just how committed am I to this project?  

I'm in. I'm committed. 

I want to use this memoir as a way to explore and understand a certain aspect of my life. (Relationships with men.) Courageous wouldn't you say? So every day I am dedicating some writing time to this project. I have taught an on-line memoir writing course through the UW, that Sue Roupp now teaches. I mentor many memoirists. And, I have devoured many a good memoirs. Now it's time to write my own. (I've written self-help books, spiritual books, blogs, short stories and finished my novel). Time to dig into my memoir.

You?

Are you writing a memoir? 

If yes, there's a one day workshop coming up you will want to attend!:

"​Memoirs are one of the fastest growing genres in the publishing industry. This one-day retreat offers sessions for emerging and established memoir writers. Nationally recognized instructors Julie Tallard Johnson, Sue Roupp, and Coleman join session director Laurie Scheer for a day devoted to developing, writing, and revising your memoir. Three manuscript critique groups available; submit your first 10 pages for feedback from your instructor and your peers."  – Laurie Scheer, Faculty Associate, Writing Mentor, Director, 31st  Annual Writers’ Institute, March 26-29, 2020, UW-Madison

Here is a link to this upcoming: WRITE YOUR MEMOIR FAST AND SURE held on Saturday October 19th, 2019.  On the beautiful Madison campus.  October 19, Pyle Center, contact laurie.scheer@wisc.edu for information.

Also, I have room for ONE MORE in my Praire Writer's Circle in Prairie du Sac. We meet up the first Wednesday night of the month. Contact me for more information:  julie@julietallardjohnson.com  

 
“To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of (our) history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.”    – Ibrah X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

Words, well used, can regenerate conversations. Words can create new ways of thinking and approaching old topics. Words well placed and with good intentions can bring people together to help us forge courageously through difficult times. A good narrative, either through story or speech can influence and get people to act. 
 
Words recruit, get people to sign on the dotted line; they even convince them to hand over their ideals and money. 
 
The first few pages of a book either loses or hooks our readers. 
 
How we frame our experiences (with thoughts, assumptions, desires, fears) creates our experiences. Our beliefs determine our actions. So, whoever or whatever influences our beliefs and view of the world, affects our actions. 
 
There is a danger that we are becoming a nation of bystanders through our reading and responding to Twitter, sending texts, and feeling satisfied with ourselves if we respond to a good blog (on our phones). Retweeting a Twitter (I do this way too much) is not taking action. 
 
If our words (even a good fiction) isn’t a call to authentic engagement then really, what’s the point? Don’t you want to influence your reader in some way so they can’t not act? An action may simply mean heading to the beach because the reader has meant to all summer (and the character in the novel died of inactivity and loneliness). 
 
Or a writer’s words may compel you toward civil disobedience.
 
How are you inspiriting others, your readers to be engaged, to take some action? 
 
My novel, tentatively titled SHIFT, (the first book of 2) is all about the internal journey, though lots of shit happens to force her on this inner journey. She comes to realize what she is capable of. Isn’t it good for each of us to know and act on our capabilities? Take risks. Shake things up (even if this just means going to the crowded beach?) Though it is fiction, I use real places and events to help make my message more real, and urgent. This book also reflects my belief that for any outer revolution to take place, an internal shift must first take place inside individuals. 
 
Hold yourself to this :No matter what you are writing, when you are ready to share it with readers, consider how your words will call the reader to action. 
 
“Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes."
"Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.”       ― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being  
 
We can’t afford to sit on the comfortable deck chair of this big beautiful cruise ship (earth) and expect the cocktails to come to us. The boat is headed to an iceberg (due to climate change). Better that we aren’t so comfortable. As a writer you can help people feel the ocean’s movement and the approach of the iceberg. You can ignite in them their own means of engagement and potential.
 
Even in my reporting for the local small-town paper, my intention is to capture the story in the board meetings that may stir my readers to engagement. Personal narrative is not allowed in these articles where I report on a local town board meeting. But there is story there. There are many calls to get involved. And my ear and pen find them. 
 
Make your readers uncomfortable. Yes, give them some relief and means to the emergencies, but not too much. Make them at least get up to get their own damn cocktail. (The rocky walk to the lounge may generate some awareness.)
 
“In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas­––from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities–– that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.”  On the book jacket’s inside flap of Ibrah X. Kendi’s, How To Be An Antiracist
 
So, what dear Writer, is your call(s) to action?
 
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” – Ibrah X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist
 
“Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy.”  –Ibrah X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist. (page 129) 
 
“Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”    
 ― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
 
I have room for one more in my Tuesday morning Writers’ Circle that meets once a month in Mount Horeb. Starts up the 2nd Tuesday in October.   Join us! 

Also openings left in my upcoming (evening) RED THREAD CIRCLE. A transformational circle that meets up once a month in Prairie du Sac. Starts Thursday September 12th.
 
I will be at Sjolind’s this coming TUESDAY, August 27th from 9:00 till 1:00. Join me to write and visit, get some free consultation on something you’re working on. Great coffee, chocolate and pastries. 

​

“Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to. That is their peril.
 
Ours is of another sort. How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.
 
We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure; incarceration in holding camps, prisons; or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is right that such protection be initiated by other writers. And it is imperative not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”
 
Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 
 
Join me and others for free retreats and writing circles. I have one opening in my Tuesday morning Writing Circle (meets monthly, begins in October). 

My yoga studio closed down. I was left without my weekly yoga classes. And with this closure went much of my yoga community. Like identifying myself as a writer, I am also a Yogi. But it’s hard to practice yoga alone at home. I pull out my mat and do some asanas but not for the full hour I get from class. Also missing is the connection to the teacher (who was phenomenal), and the other yoga students who gifted me with community. There are also some postures that I just don’t like doing at home alone, sans support. 

I am in search of another yoga teacher and studio that works for me, where I can practice my yoga and build my community. I’m sure to find one because I believe that which I am searching for is also searching for me (be it a publisher, lover or yoga teacher). Everything happens through these connections.

​My writing and transformational circles are based on Parker J Palmer’s circles of trust and 30 years of my own research and work on forming safe and dynamic circles. My first book, published in 1989, included setting up healing groups for families and friends of those with chronic mental illness. I made sure that the publisher (Doubleday) didn’t use the word “cope” in the title. Getting drunk every day is a way to cope, just not a skillful one. I left a Sangha after a decade of participation when I realized it was community I truly sought, not enlightenment. They lacked the community element.  
 
In my writing circles we form bonds where we are able to explore our capacities as writers, get encouragement and guidance. Everyones writing improves as you participate in circle.  A consistency of showing up to circle cultivates our writing (or yoga) practice. Showing up on the mat or to the page is elemental to our success as yogis and writers. 

Joining others helps us show up to the page.
 
Join me and other writers in safe and dynamic circles. I have a few openings in my writing circles starting this September and October. (My Tuesday morning one in Mount Horeb is small with only 6 writers. I have room for 2 more).  With my circles you give yourself community, encouragement, and some of the best mentoring and guidance from me, your Writing Sherpa.  You give yourself accountability. I will give you some writing prompts along the way. 
 
My Monthly Transformative Circle: The Red Thread: Touching Reality in our Everyday Lives, which starts up this September and meets one Thursday evening a month, is based on my upcoming book.  We gather once a month to support each other’s spiritual and creative lives. 
 
Also, I am offering my first yoga and writing retreat with Molly Chanson this August. The retreat is held at Holy Wisdom Monastery so you can choose to return home at night or stay the night at HW.  (See below)

Finally, come meet me and other writers at a free Writers' Retreat Monday August 19th from 10 it'll 4:00.  Email me for details. 
 
Magic happens at these gatherings. 

 
Join us this August! Mind, Body, Word: 3 Days of Yoga and Writing
If you haven't signed up, it's time!! If you already signed up, we are so excited to spend these days with you! We will explore and renew Self on the mat and the page.  Yoga and writing combine as lenses to explore the True Self. Attend to deepen or awaken your yoga and writing practices! This is sure to be a magical 3 days and we hope to see you there! 
Register Here!

Meet Molly Chanson
Molly will complete her 200-hour yoga teacher training in July at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Molly has practiced yoga for over 25 years, and is writing her first book. Learn more about Molly here.

 

 ​THE LIGHTEST TOUCH
​
Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then, like a hand in the dark,
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.
In the silence that follows
a great line,
you can feel Lazarus,
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.       David Whyte,
- from EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU and RIVER FLOW
 
Everything is waiting for you, for us. The completed book, the house, the relationship, the revelation, the peace of mind – the idea, is there. Here. For you. Even when the world seems to be revealing the opposite, and our heart may be breaking. Of course what shows up may not be what we expected or wanted. 
 
Work with that. Write from there. 
 
A fundamental truth (for us writers) is always here for each of us at every moment: to find that place where the internal landscape and narrative of our lives meets with the outer world  experiences– this is the writer’s frontier. You don't ever leave it. 
 
What works, for me, is to stay in the conversation. When writing on a particular subject and theme – I  listen and notice how these come up in my every-day life. This is how my writing practice has become part of my spiritual practice. Everything becomes material for me to work with (on and off the page). 
 
We have to rely on others, to ask for help, to give into the vulnerability of not knowing. We can choose to listen to and engage the uncertainty. We will have to open our eyes even wider to consider what we might do, where we might go. Listen to the internal conversation as much as to the outer experience.  Like the advice I've given in sweat lodges -- keep your eyes open; there's much to see in the dark.
 
Be curious.
Get help.
Stay in the conversation.
Never leave home without your field notebook. 
Work with this.
 
 
My view? That the very health and beauty of this world relies on us to do so. 
 
 
SOMETIMES

​Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest, breathing
like the ones
in the old stories, who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound, you come to a place
whose only taskis to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
andto stop what you
are becoming
while you do it, questions
that can make
or unmake
a life, questions
that have patiently
waited for you, questions
that have no right
to go away..- David Whyte, from EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU and RIVER FLOW

JOIN ME AND OTHER WRITERS for a a FREE WRITERS’ RETREAT:  MONDAY August 19th from 10 am till 4:00.  Email me for location (near Barneveld) and for other details.  julie@julietallardjohnson.com

(For those who are wondering if I got my novel done -  YUP! Now for some serious revision before I send it out to an agent.)