The University of the Self #42

The Smallest of Things

Image description: On a white piece of paper I have drawn in black pen the outline of an elephant with its tongue resting on the floor. The elephant’s body is divided up into lines on which are written a selection of words: awkward, talking way too much, probably shouting, masking like crazy, interrupting, inappropriate, worried, stimming, hyperfocused, in a sensory nightmare, sitting alone, quiet

The Smallest of Things

(this essay was first written 29th July, 2023 and reproduced with a few minor edits today, 7th December, 2024)

Right now, I’m reading Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery by Alys Fowler (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017), and next in the queue is I Belong Here, by Anita Sethi, Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2021). It has taken me a very long time to realise that I have been fascinated all my life with literature about journeys, about landscapes and places. I think back to my formative relationship with Tolkien’s work (as discussed in my earlier essay Hibernaculum) — those Hobbit based tales are all about those journeys.

I love sensing the authors travelling through a period of their lives; travelling through a series of thoughts to reach somewhere both inside and outside of themselves. It has taken me four years and more than many, many thousands of words (I have written many essays on this journey to try and understand myself as a creative) to realise that they are all somehow about the journeys I have made to consider myself a writer; about becoming a writer.

In fact, I am a bit wowed to discover that a journey can reveal to you who you have been and who you wish to be. That you have the power to learn, to forget about past mistakes and to change for the better. That seems like a completely massive concept. You are born and you travel through so many landscapes for so many years (in my case, fifty-three of them) so that you can finally arrive at the destination of the self. That’s made my brain feel all curly-wurly.

Yesterday, I was tapping way on the laptop, in an attempt to wind this essay up. I really didn’t want to be disturbed; indeed, I was becoming quite grumpy about it, as the gears in my head were turning at a frustratingly lacklustre pace. I was forcing my brain to think. I was angry with my mind. I had allowed myself to become impatient, and invulnerable to self-care.

It got to evening-time and E—, the little girl from the caravan over the road wandered in, clutching a big bag of mussels and asked me to cook them for her. For a fleeting moment, resentment flashed through my mind. Then I felt myself returning her smile. E— is six years old and brilliant — how could I refuse? I am not the most willing cook in the world and always find cooking deeply stressful, so while I set to the job, she happily made a fine old mess filling the teapot with tea and the cups with sugar, as her mam and grandma had, by now, come over too. I gave her my purple feather duster to play with and she used it to further distribute tea leaves and sticky sugar granules around the room.

Soon, the place began to smell of garlic and the sea. The aroma, whether you like eating mussels or not was gorgeously, tantalisingly overwhelming. The blue-black teardrop-shaped shells clacked in the pan as I stirred them, bringing to mind the times I had gathered shells on beaches — the sound and sensation of washing them clean of sand in the cold, lapping sea. I heard the mournful cry of seagulls. My tongue spiked with the imaginary taste of salt. The kettle whistled out a jet of steam and I clattered cups together, did my best to refocus and concentrate, and brewed the tea.

We all sat outside. E— ate her mussels, and we drank our tea. The colourful solar lights flickered on and a mild sort of dark settled above our heads. Huge, stunning hawk moths diddered and dandled along the clear roof and my husband gently cupped them in his hands and gave them back to the sky. E— went with him every time, marvelling at every moth’s release. We snuggled down into the piles of mismatched charity shop cushions that line the home-built benches with newly charged content.

Why am I telling you this? Because we all need a reminder sometimes that there is so much magic to be found in insignificant-seeming everyday acts: acts that at first appear to intrude upon our precious time; acts of friendship and kindness; acts of togetherness. When we surrender ourselves to these occasions; when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to such moments; when we crack our hearts open to welcome in the smallest of noticings, things like twinkling lights, moths, the smell of cooking or the sound of shells become miracles. If we don’t take a break sometimes; if we don’t step away from our work, from our routines, we run the risk of such magic passing us by.

I felt reenergized; refilled with a dozen new poem ideas; realigned upon my writing path; reminded of the link between words and joy. I figured I could finish the essay tomorrow. Maybe even the day after that.

The same can be said of allowing ourselves to be creatively ‘distracted’ — we may unexpectedly encounter a poem, a picture, a piece of music, a conversation, a bird in the sky, for example, that we did not intend to be part of our day. In making ourselves vulnerable to their positive influence and inspiration, we will be taken along new, unexpected paths and it will be reflected in the work that we create.

Positive openness to vulnerability can make writing seem effortless. If we lower our guard to the myriad joys of the world — joys of landscape, nature, human interactions, art, history, mythology, sensory information (to name a few) — indeed, to its very unpredictability, then we open the floodgates of inspiration. There is no strict rule or method to engendering this internal environment — try to visualize the process as a natural, welcoming state of being. Teach yourself not to refuse these influxes of wonder — you might have set out determined to write about lakes and find that radical openness has brought to you the smell of lace, or an old lover’s hair, or geraniums nodding over a neighbour’s fence. These unforced moments of creativity are where, for me, the magic really begins.

This is where the use of lists can be most recommended. In order to grasp these flights of inspiration before they vanish (we all know how elusive and willow-the-wisp such catalysts can be), making creative lists can prove to be most useful. List poems always operate using anaphora (phrases or lines begin with the same word) and lend our work a beautiful sense of litany, rhythm, incantation. They also remove the worry of wondering how to begin or construct each line which is of much use when speed necessitates the placing of much information on the page. Perhaps something like this:

For E— who carried her supper to my door
For E— whose eyes were brighter than the stars
For E— who smiled as the shells opened in the pan
For E— who brought me the smell of the sea

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