Whistler and Me – a story of stories told, revised, retold…

It has been said that the writing life is a life lived twice.

There is a beautiful truth in this that has to do with reflection, refraction, and intensification.

First, there is the living.  Then, there is the remarkable alchemy of re-telling.

People often ask me how I find the subjects of my poetry, reflections, and essays.

Like a watercolor painter, I keep a sketchbook.  This is to say, a daily journal.  Whether I am facing into a mundane Monday, or setting out for the Scottish Highlands, my journal is the first thing I put into my carry-on bag: because who knows what remarkable “something” will happen between my front door and the curb?

 Over a lifetime of paying attention — recording, recalling, sorting – I have come to realize each day’s singular and the evanescent moments beg for the reverence they deserve.

On November 14, I am inviting a small gathering to dive into this healing, boundary-busting, and infinitely enjoyable practice.

Come if you can.

https://www.bethanyhousearlington.org/calendar/journal-as-meditation

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I’ve just finished reading Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler.

This lovely work overflows with the redemptive power of the same process I experience in my journal — hearing and telling life’s stories in “layers” of return and reanimation – a kind of pentimento that enables the characters to grow, deepen in complexity and wisdom, and in the end, be redeemed.

Many of us have known sudden deaths or catastrophic accidents, traumatic childhood events, secret lives, shattered relationships.  So often family narratives get frozen through the years of their repetition.

A journal invites a very different opportunity.  The benevolent pressure of review, of rethinking the narrative – sometimes with new wisdom or information – allows a tale to soften around the edges and take on new life.  With the distance of time, and the advance of insight and imaginative questions, our stories blossom – no longer set in rigid lock boxes.

In Whistler, the expert magician Patchett sets all of this before us, allowing exquisite details to alter the meaning of events – a divorced wife’s car is lovingly equipped with a survival kit and regular oil changes by the man who has left her, the favorite song of a beloved child is recalled in her 50s by a long-lost stepfather, a mother acquiescences to her daughter’s longing for a fluffy teddy bear coat, which very likely saves her life, a husband offers the gift of a miniature statue painted when he was a boy.

Our journals, a favorite tool of that master of the inner life Carl Jung, invites the same moments of grace and magic.  It trains us too look at life more closely, to be more present.  It offers keys to healing and freedom, as we discover over and over again the many kinds of love that are not only possible but redemptive, and that more often than not arrive in our lives via those we never expect, or those we want desperately to change but can’t.

Taking the time to open ourselves to all of it – the thorns and broken bones and stuck marriages and children who keep making the same mistakes – will reveal the infinite tenderness at the heart of existence.

I hope you’ll join me!