WANDERING AND WONDERING

 

Do you work things out by writing about them? Not just plotlines or character development. Not just the layout of a poem. But day-to-day things that are bothering you in life?

I try to keep a routine of prayer journal/morning pages, where I mull over all sorts of things in God’s presence. Sometimes I address him directly, sometimes I throw it all out on the page knowing:

“that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” (George Elliot)

There’s something about expressing concerns in black and white that anchors them, stops them from running around and around in my head. It’s as if closing my journal contains them, stops them growing uncontrollably in my imagination like those monsters that might leap out of pavement cracks if we tread on them. The problem itself may not go away but it somehow loses its potency by being described and explored on the page.

Since I finished my Masters, I’ve been feeling a bit lost, wondering what next. So, as part of my morning routine, I decided to read through Exodus. The Israelites wandering around the wilderness seemed an apt parallel that I hoped to learn from. How can I find and enter that Promised Land of writing success (and let’s be honest, by ‘success’ I mean ‘publication’)?

At my first TRELLIS group meeting in November, we wrote about Journeys and as I reflected on what I’d read in Exodus, I realised that my wilderness analogy wasn’t entirely accurate. I ended up with this poem:

 

JOURNEY

 

I thought this was the wilderness

As I wonder how to find the Promised Land

But now I see my wandering

Was when I thought I knew where I was going

Or when I trudged through sandstorms

Little knowing (little caring) the direction,

My sole aim to remain upright.

Or when I took wrong turns

Pursued a calling beyond its term,

Followed the false lights of ambition.

That was my wilderness:

Energy sapping

Scorching dry

Freezing dark

Mirages fading in the haze as I drew near.

 

Now I have crossed the Jordan

Where you went ahead

And cleared me a path

(My feet not even wet).

Now I stand on the far side

The wilderness behind me

A land of promise ahead

But what that promise is

I do not yet know.

 

The final years in my last job were my wilderness, my MA my crossing into the Promised Land. I can see I’ll have to read Joshua as well to help me find and claim my particular place in it.

Brendan Conboy also wrote a poem about the Israelites in the wilderness from that TRELLIS session, reminding us of the light God sent to guide them. Sarah Tumney wrote haikus for each object we’d brought to the meeting as prompts, the last line for mine being ‘God my GPS’, another pertinent image.

It seems to me that Advent can be a bit of an Exodus place: running around in circles getting nowhere, waiting for the fulfilment of a promise. But here I am again, writing something that, as I do so, shows me patterns and reassurance I hadn’t seen before.

May God guide all of us this Advent in and through our writing.

Liz Manning lives in Cornwall and has recently finished a Creative Writing MA at Plymouth University. Her dissertation was a visual poetry collection, (a mixture of words and art) which explored the idea of reclaiming and reshaping difficult times through faith and making. Since finishing, she’s taken part in some local open mic poetry nights, is submitting her work to various journals and competitions, and contributed to The Jesse Tree Anthology.

She continues to blog at https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/  and has a new website in development at lizmanning.me