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Remember the linguistic origins of the word yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to your pain is to dive deeper into your caring.”
In our Writer's Circle, the private writing group I lead, we end each session with lovingkindness for writers all over the world. It's a beautiful practice that binds us to writers everywhere, the inter-being of the word community. Every time we do it, I get chills. Before I send out each newsletter, I do lovingkindness for each one of you, for all the writers receiving my words: may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you be inspired.
When I thought about what we, as writers, can do to keep supporting writers in Ukraine and all over the world who risk their lives for words, I knew that diving into lovingkindness work would be the best, most accessible answer.
It is the same answer I have come up with for writers working to end gun violence in the US - my husband, a writer, is a high school teacher in an unsafe environment - and for all the writers who are bleeding on the page to end violence against women and to protect our rights here in the US and around the world. The writers who are desperately fighting this virus, holding those who have lost dear ones to COVID, working hard to tell the truth and heal division.
This work cultivates compassion and empathy - you can't write well without them. It widens the borders of our hearts. It increases our connection to the spaces outside our imaginations and the bubbles of our lives.
There are books you cannot write
until you do this work.
How can your words help articulate what it means to be human, or midwife your readers through their life's journey, if those words aren't rooted in deep care for yourself and all beings, and for the planet we are so lucky to reside on? Lovingkindness can be the foundation of empathy for one's self and all of creation. It is a form of training the heart.
What's happening in Ukraine is horrifying and very hard to wrap our minds around. (As a side note: it's shameful the world didn't respond to Syria and many other conflicts and genocides and war crimes with such an outpouring of love and solidarity.)
Unless you're someone like me, who writes about war (my WIP is about war correspondents, I've written about vets with PTSD, and my last, CODE NAME BADASS, is about a WWII spy), then what's happening globally and nationally might just be too overwhelming to hold. You might feel numb about it all. There is so much we're trying to do to keep our heads above water in our personal lives and the communities we are a part of. I get it.
But that overwhelm you're feeling? This work addresses it, and it widens your capacity to meet this world more skillfully and kindly. It's tender work that heals in unexpected ways. It is how I stopped hating myself, how I worked through painful relationships, and how I began to understand what it means to do right by the miracle.
Lovingkindness practice for other writers is a way to create more inter-being within our scribe tribe. We can carry the poets, novelists, journalists, songwriters, playwrights, screenwriters, bloggers, speechwriters, and journalers in our heart.
THIS IS NOT A TRITE PRACTICE, NOR IS IT SPIRITUAL BYPASSING.
It may seem like you sitting in a room sending loving thoughts through the unconscious collective's highway system is a bullshit response. But we can't help anyone if we don't truly care about them. Your check to UNICEF without your feelings, that donation out of guilt, that feeling of having done something just because you read the news (then shake your head, put it away, and move on with your day)...we're better than that.
As writers, a part of our job is push against the edges of our hearts and make a little more room in there. In engaging with this kind of work, we are training ourselves to put that sense of care on the page, pages that might galvanize, challenge, or inspire our readers.
This work will have a direct effect on your ability to carry others and yourself. It will have a ripple effect like you wouldn't believe on the page. It will help you write better villains, and better heroines.
It will help.
Below are two guided meditations I created for our global writing community:
Lovingkindness for Writers and Lovingkindness for Writers Under Fire.
If you’re hurting over Ukraine, over journalists being targeted in Russia and Mexico and Palestine (and everywhere), sick over the oppression of writers all around the world, over censorship, over the silencing of indigenous, divergent, and unheard voices from so many communities, sick of kids and teachers being gunned down and women's lives being put at risk by an unjust Supreme Court, and on and on and on...then Writers Under Fire will give you a chance to erase the borders of your heart for writers around the world who are deeply unsafe.
As Rumi says, Your heart is the size of the ocean.
It really is.
The second meditation, Lovingkindness for Writers, is guided work focused on compassion toward the writers in our personal lives - ourselves, the beloved teachers, dear friends, authors who inspire us…and the writers who try our patience.
May this work be of benefit and may all writers everywhere be happy, healthy, safe, and inspired.
Here's something very delightful and tactile you can do as a spring project:
Not too long after the war in Ukraine broke out, I walked by a nearby church and saw a clothesline covered in tied ribbons, each representing a prayer. There was a bag nailed to a post and anyone could add their own ribbon - it reminded me a lot of the Shinto temples I visited long ago in Kyoto.
I was struck with the idea of creating my very own Celtic wishing tree - these are a real thing and I've always wanted to see one.
My neighbor and her kids in our side-by-side duplex, my husband and I....we feel things deeply. So I bought this plant sculpture thing - it reminded me of my beloved Ukraine and of good memories in Russia. My husband said it looked like a penis. My neighbor's friend said it resembled a rocket ship. Whatever. It's now a cool-ass wishing tree.
See all those ribbons? They come out of a bag labeled:
Wishes
Hopes
Prayers
Intentions
Miracles
Dreams
MAGIC
I tie one on before a big doctor's appointment. After a tough conversation. When I read something painful in the news. When I'm worried about someone. When I want something and am whispering that want into the universe's ear.
It's grand and it makes me happy, out there in our backyard. The wind never blows it down and the intense Minnesota weather doesn't seem to cause any trouble.
It reminds me of a lighthouse. And how we can be our own lighthouses in the dark. And shine light when others can't find their way through it.
If you make a wishing tree, send me a picture! I'd love to see it. This is a very tactile way of doing lovingkindness for yourself and others, and the planet.
Okay, and this book is a balm to my bittersweet soul - I have rarely felt so utterly seen and now have a term for what I am: a bittersweet gal who thrives in the minor key. I'm not a wet blanket or a bummer or negative: I am bittersweet, which is the yummiest chocolate so there.
I wanted to share this book this month because of our work with lovingkindness, which Cain also mentions as a wonderful practice for you bittersweet selves.
Can I get an amen to this:
"What is the ache you can't get rid of--and could you make it your creative offering?...Could your ache be, asLeonard Cohen said, the way you embrace the sun and the moon? And do you know the lessons of your own particular sorrow?...You must find a way to transform the pain of the ages, even as you find the freedom to write your own story."
Bittersweet is about that, and so much more. It has been so helpful for me as I navigate writing difficult material and a particularly tough time with my health (the body, as the Zen Master husband says, is my koan). It has helped me work more skillfully with - and articulate - my holy fury at the injustices and suffering in the world. It affirms my choice to channel this fury through words and my work with all y'all.
As a result of this season's global events and deep reflections on mortality and meaning - including studying Cain's work - I'll be adding a fourth key to the Keyring of Desire in my Unlock craft work (the current workbook is on the portal, but the new insights will be in my upcoming Writing Bingeable Characters course).
Being a bittersweet type is a part of my process that I've fully embraced, one that results in much better work. I live and create in the minor key - it's what gives me energy, in much the same way that solitude jazzes me. If you are curious about your own process, let's YHAP together.
I feel so lucky that we have this distinct way - words and lovingkindness - to support our spirits during difficult times.
May you be healthy, happy, safe, and inspired-
