Write until your heart is nothing but ashes

12/22/2021

Write until your heart is nothing but ashes is taken from this excerpt from a Barry Lopez lecture, 2008:

"I wondered what it meant to be a story teller—the saying of what one imagines, which includes poetry. What does that kind of person do? ...

Without making too fine a point of it, because writers of one frame of mind about this can bristle in the presence of writers of another frame of mind, it seems to me that writers are in the tradition of story teller and that story tellers are, primarily, pattern makers and pattern keepers. They are, in the phrase of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, the servants of memory. Our Achilles heel as a species has been that we forget—and I believe story arose early in our history as a response to that, to the danger of forgetting, the fear that comes over us when we realize that it is because we have forgotten something that our plans to improve the present have gone awry.

It goes without saying that you are talented and determined men and women, and that you have something to say. I would ask you to put aside for now the urgencies of the moment we are all grappling with and to concentrate instead on the different urgency you feel as an artist. We need that. We need, more than we can properly say, stories and poems that will stick. Write until your mind goes blank. Write until your heart is nothing but ashes. Please."

A wonderful tribute and message: HORIZONS This 20 minute video is worth your time. Choose a line that speaks to you from this video and write about that. This is given through EMERGENCE Magazine.

Here is a link to Barry Lopez's website: HERE

And, please post your responses to the conversation here. (I finally figured out how to post and share comments).

3 Comments

Jackie Redmer

12/22/2021 01:50:16 pm

"If you stay in this place out of fear, you will not find the landscape that your imagination is yearning for. The effort of the imagination is to turn the boundary into a horizon because there is no endpoint for you; the boundary says here and no further; the horizon says, welcome."

The Horizons video has been working on me and the quote I extracted reminds me of a week-long backpacking trip I took with a girlfriend to Isle Royale National Park in 2007. On that trip we chose to not use a tent and instead planned to sleep outside with only our sleeping bags. We were absolutely enchanted by Lake Superior and wanted to take in the full experience of falling asleep while watching the open sky and listening to the waves as they broke on the shoreline. I do recall one night in which we woke-up to a thunderstorm and then found ourselves frantically putting our tent up in the dark as the rain poured down on us. On that trip it became clear to me that any perceptions I had regarding the protection afforded by sleeping in a tent, were in fact, only perceptions or mental impressions, not hard truth.

With so much of Lopez’s writing I see him speaking about the natural world and the human condition simultaneously. During those nights spent on Isle Royale I imagined in great detail the harm that could come from sleeping out in the open, including: 1) moose stampede - unlikely, 2) attack by wolf pack - unlikely, 3) attack by humans - possible and not prevented by sleeping in a tent and 4) rain/bad weather - possible and could be dealt with by then putting up a tent. I realized then that the set of beliefs which had always kept me in my tent on so many beautiful, mosquito-free, open nights were nothing more than fear-based fantasies, perhaps taught to me from fear-minded adults or possibly imagined since childhood. These beliefs came at the cost of not experiencing intimacy with the land on my camping trips. Today, I am coming to see how this is true in human culture and in relationships as well. Perceptions of safety, are in fact, only perceptions. Without vulnerability and trust we miss the opportunity to interface with the intimacy we crave in the human landscape as well.

Julie Tallard Johnson

12/22/2021 02:50:06 pm

Thank you Jackie, The last several lines gave me a bit of a good internal nudge.

Amy Plum

2/7/2022 12:23:19 pm

What a beautiful video tribute to a man I did not know of until now! So many quotes of his that I wrote down that I love, which one to choose! My favorite one that I will chew on for now is: "I really am just a conduit in the sense that I don't have an agenda. I love language and I love story and I really love how story reconstitutes, reorients, elevates human beings". Such beautiful stuff.

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Author and counselor Julie Tallard Johnson

My book The Clue of the Red Thread is my latest of eleven, written in collaboration with Parker J Palmer and poet Rebecca Cecchini The Clue of the Red Thread: Discovering Fearlessness & Compassion in uncertain times came out in January, 2021 through Shanti Arts, Nine Rivers Imprint.

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Write until your heart is nothing but ashes

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Welcome toJulie's BlogWorld into Word & Action ​Read the past posts.

Julie's Blog
World into Word & Action

Welcome to
Julie's Blog

World into Word & Action

Read the past posts.