I have taken to writing things again. Not typing them, texting them, instant messaging them or emailing them. Writing them. The simple act of writing has so many more implications than just putting pen to paper.
I was inspired to do this by a couple of things. The lessor of them was that I have noticed as I scribble the occasional note, my handwriting has become sloppy over the past few years. We all know that practice makes perfect; the other side of that is that if we don’t keep up with the practice, what we are doing becomes less perfect. This is true for many things: sitting for meditation, exercising, speaking a different language than our dominant one. The more I do the act of writing, the clearer my penmanship becomes and the pen moves across the paper with the great ease and flair that I knew so well before my laptop became a fixture in my life.
I am, in fact, a writer. I have been writing things, published and not, since I was fourteen. I used to always have a notebook with me and a pen that I only used for serious writing.
I could pull them out at any time and let the words spill out on to the paper. Now, I carry my laptop. While I have loved the ease in making corrections, changing paragraphs around and thank goodness for spellcheck!, what I have missed in typing instead of writing has been the full-on experience of it.
When I type, I feel the cerebral action of it. I type from my brain, from my thoughts, my memory. I am interrupted in my flow of expression by the reminders in red and blue underlines that invariably pop up on to the page. Somehow, I am typing on this thing that is clearly separate form me. When I hand write, I am fully and completely present in what I write. The pen is an extension of my hand as it moves to make the letters. It is a somatic experience, involving the whole of me, and I can feel it come from my whole self. I can write and not worry about spelling errors, I’ll catch them later. I can write in full-on stream of consciousness, letting the words flow out of me and on to the page. The handwriting is mine and shows my personality. When I write, I underline and space with the eye of the poet that I am, and it comes across on the paper in a way that typing cannot show. My words are on a typed page; my personality is on a hand-written one.
I took a writing class with the internationally known Zen practitioner/writing instructor/author/artist Natalie Goldberg many years ago, and she talked about the feel of the paper and the pen in the hand; the feel of the way the pen glides across the paper allowing thoughts/feelings to flow. A sensory experience. Writing awakens our fine motor control (the ability to manipulate precise movement). All motor control is an integrated product of three aspects of the human anatomy: muscles, bones, and the central nervous system. It wakes up our entire system. This is how we become more present and connected to what write as we write it.
As I continue to work on my book, I have returned to writing it in longhand before typing it out. I have started writing long, handwritten letters to my dear friend even though we talk on the phone and send emails regularly. I don’t tell her what’s coming in the letter. I let it be a gift from me that she can open when she’s ready and has a few quiet moments to read it.
It’s ironic that I am typing this so that I can put it forth for you to read. I wrote it yesterday while sitting on a bench on the bluffs above the ocean at Half Moon Bay, CA. Thanks for reading it.
