Last Sunday, I led a nomadic writing fieldtrip to the water tower on Volunteer Park. Monty, a friend I met at St James Cathedral several years ago, was one of the individuals who came to see what words would flow from his pen. Monty by trade is a computer programmer and is a fairly serious minded individual. Well, anyhow what I had all the participants do was roll three dice to randomly select one of sixteen prompt words. Monty’s random selection was “isolation.”
The next step in the experiment was to lay the word out on its side. So, that the participant could then use each letter of the word prompt to build a brief narrative using only words that begin with those characters. The final step was to expand the brief narrative into a much longer one within the time constraint of twenty minutes. And shown below is what Monty constructed in the allotted time.
I am hoping that by posting examples of these excursions from people will inspire others “who don’t think they have it in them” to come and experience spontaneous creativity. These field-trips work better when more than one person attends. There is a mystery in the gathering of minds or the communion of individuals that cultivate creativity in the self. Yes, writing is a solitary activity, but it doesn’t have to be. We, as individuals, can achieve greatness when we lower our defense mechanisms (to quote Monty below) so that we can work side-by-side as collective of minds.
In
Solitude
Our
Love
Always
Tells
Intimate
Oneness
Now
In our solitude, our stillness always reveals our intimate wholeness with nature. The story of our being is disclosed only in our stillness. It is [in] stillness that we become aware of our relatedness all that is around us: nature, creation, human beings, friends, enemies, and lovers.
Why doesn’t stillness have the power to unveil the intimate workings of the mystery that makes up our being? It is during stillness that our defense mechanisms sleep. A prime example of how this works is how lovers [behave]. When a man pursues a woman to be his equal and they become mates, he must first build a trust within her so that she can open herself up to him. One could say, an individual needs to eliminate one defense [mechanism in order] to allow another [defense] to appreciate the penetrating embrace of another [individual]. Trust must be built in the foundations of an individual’s body, mind, and soul. Each layer of [inter]personal intimate relating requires an “appreciating” of the other individual’s advances. An embrace of a man and a woman should be a message to each other and not an abrasive friction that evolves from defensive postures.
If stillness is the crystal ball of knowing oneself then is it not also the prophet of where our happiness lies? Is there a power [outside of self] to lead us into stillness so that we can be liberated from our defense mechanism [that cultivate loneliness] so that we can achieve the happiness that we all seek?
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