The physical world pours in

(if you haven't started writing small stones yet, there's plenty of time... all the time in the world)

Thanks to Jacqueline for her small stone photo of Sumi's paws. There are some very fine photos and small stones on Olivia's blog too. And many many many many many many finely observed small stones being scattered by you, fine reader, and everyone else in the river, all across the world.

Our very own in-the-river Claire is currently at third place for the Shorty Awards in the Poetry category - if you'd like to vote for her go here, or Tweet something like this: "I nominate @ThoseThr3Words for a Shorty Award in #poetrybecause... she's in the river! http://bit.ly/shorty"

I found a lovely essay by Linda Gregg this week (The Art of Finding), whilst doing research for my 'Writing as Spiritual Practice' course (only one space left for March, but I'm hoping to run it again in May and September so email me if you'd like to go down on the reserve list or the might-be-interested-list.) 

I wanted to share this paragraph in full as it fits so perfectly with what we're trying to do. 

Do share your experiences of writing small stones in the comments section, and with each other. Do visit each other's blogs. Do remember that this exercise is to help us enjoy the world - and to help us get right up close to it, so close we can see the hairs on its nose. 

Keep up the sterling work!

"I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. 

At the beginning, they typically "see" things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become "old men with snow on their shoulders," or the lake looks like a "giant eye." The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. 

Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of carrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human."