writing practice

The Monster in the Mirror

by

The mirror is a monster for a lot of people.

I know this because I have stood in front of it and felt the room change.

Not every time. Not dramatically. No gothic apparition rising out of the glass. Sometimes it’s much quieter than that. You’re brushing your teeth, washing your face, catching yourself in a shop window. Someone shows you a photograph they’ve just taken. And suddenly you aren’t simply seeing yourself.

You are being assessed.

One moment there’s a man standing there. The next moment there’s evidence. Evidence of age, of tiredness, of decisions made and not made. Evidence of the body changing. Evidence of time doing what time does, which is to move through us whether we’ve granted permission or not.

The mirror doesn’t lie, exactly. That would be too easy. If it lied, I could dismiss it: bad glass, bad angle, bad lighting, bad morning. But the mirror is more dangerous because it tells a partial truth with absolute confidence.

It shows the surface and then lets the mind do the damage.

And my mind, like most minds, has been well trained. It knows how to turn a face into a problem. It knows how to compare the present body with some imagined earlier body, conveniently forgetting what it was like to live inside that earlier one. The younger man gets better-looking with every year that separates me from him. Apparently, he was also more certain, more energetic and closer to getting his life sorted out. Memory makes a generous publicist for someone who no longer has to show up.

I suspect that if I could stand beside him, we’d both find something wrong with ourselves. He’d be worrying about a future I’m now accusing myself of having wasted. Neither of us would be paying much attention to the fact that we were alive in the same room.

The people in the glass

The glass itself says nothing. Stand in front of it long enough, though, and you can hear people who haven’t been in your life for twenty years.

The comments. The jokes. The rejections. The cultural instructions that arrived so early they began to sound like your own thoughts. A man should be strong, composed, capable, unbothered. He should take care of himself without appearing to care too much about his appearance. He should age well, which often seems to mean showing the authority of age while concealing as much of its physical evidence as possible.

There’s a particular strain in being asked to look invulnerable while living in a body. Bodies get tired. They soften, ache, need sleep. They have days when the face gives away something the mouth was planning to keep quiet.

And a Black man’s face and body are never entirely private. The world is always reading something into them before he has even opened his mouth. Strength, threat, confidence, attitude: meanings can arrive ahead of the person. I don’t get to control all those readings. But knowing they’re there can change the way I look at myself. I can begin checking the face for what someone else might decide it means.

That makes the bathroom a crowded place. I can be alone and still not get to look at myself alone.

So the mirror is not just glass. It is a courtroom. And sometimes I stand there as both accused and prosecutor.

Too old. Too soft. Too tired. Too this. Not enough that. Not quite the man I imagined I’d be when I was younger and still believed the future would arrive clean and obedient. Not quite the warrior, the professor, the writer. Not quite the self-made man who owed nobody anything.

Owe nobody anything

I was raised with a strong current of self-reliance running through me. Owe nobody anything. Stand on your own feet. Be capable. Be independent.

There’s strength in that inheritance. It has carried me. I don’t want to dismiss the discipline that helped me move from Newark beginnings into Army dreams and through the reinventions that followed. Being able to act, to take responsibility, to keep going when things become difficult: those are real gifts. I still want them.

But self-reliance has also sharpened the mirror. When you believe you’re responsible for making yourself, every perceived flaw can start to feel like a personal failure. You don’t merely have a body that’s changing. You have a body you apparently failed to manage properly.

The body becomes a report card. The face becomes a progress review. Ageing becomes an accusation: what have you done with the time?

And now, edging deeper into this late-middle passage of life, I feel that question more. Not always as dread. Sometimes as fuel. Sometimes as tenderness towards the years I couldn’t understand while I was living them. But it’s there, waiting for a glimpse of grey in the beard or an expression I don’t remember having before.

There are things I wish I’d done differently. I don’t need a philosophy that makes every decision wise after the event. Some opportunities were missed. Some habits stayed longer than they should have. The trouble begins when regret stops referring to something particular and spreads across the whole person. I wish I’d done that differently becomes look at you. A whole life gets hauled in to answer for one tired face on one ordinary morning.

The self-made man is particularly vulnerable to this trick because he’s given himself a job nobody can finish. He must be the maker and the material, the foreman and the finished product. Even rest can feel like neglect of the works.

And what happens when he needs someone? When he can’t fix it? When love arrives in a form that requires him to be helped rather than admired?

Owing nobody anything sounds like freedom until it makes receiving care feel like a debt. I wonder how much of what I call independence has, at times, been an attempt to avoid being seen in need. The mirror catches that man too: the one who wants to be held, but would prefer to look as though he could carry everything himself.

Carrying the inspection around

We didn’t leave the mirror in the bathroom. We put a camera on the front of the phone and carried the inspection around.

Now a conversation can come with a small image of ourselves in the corner. Someone is speaking and there’s another, quieter activity taking place: checking the face, the posture, the angle. Do I look interested? Do I look tired? Is that really how I look when I’m listening?

It’s an odd arrangement. We can watch ourselves having an experience instead of quite having it. A photograph of a good afternoon becomes an opportunity to dislike the person who was enjoying it. The record of being there starts competing with the pleasure of having been there.

I don’t want to blame the camera for inventing vanity or shame. The courtroom was open long before the smartphone. But it has become easier to keep the hearing in session. There’s always another image to inspect, another version of the face to approve or reject.

I keep coming back to the cost in attention. While I’m deciding whether I look like someone worth listening to, what am I failing to hear? While I’m checking whether I look alive enough in the photograph, where has the actual afternoon gone?

There must be a point at which seeing myself more often means being present less often. I don’t know exactly where that point is. I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching myself spend it.

The page asks better questions

What have you done with the time?

The mirror asks it badly. Writing asks it better.

That may be why I trust the page more than the glass. The page lets me become slowly. It doesn’t demand that I appear all at once. It lets me contradict myself, revise myself, wander off, return, discover that what looked like failure was actually material.

A life is a palimpsest, a manuscript written over without everything underneath disappearing. The boy in Newark doesn’t vanish because the soldier arrives. The soldier doesn’t disappear when the writer begins to name what he wants. Earlier selves remain in the vocabulary, the reflexes, the things I notice and the things I still struggle to say.

On the page, I can spend time with them. I can discover that the self I’m judging had reasons I haven’t been willing to remember. He knew less than I know now. He was trying to solve a different problem. Sometimes he was simply afraid. Understanding that doesn’t make every choice right, but it makes a person visible where I’d been keeping a list of errors.

The mirror freezes me. The page releases me.

Except I know the page can become a courtroom too. I can turn a journal into another instrument of inspection. Count the unwritten words, catalogue the shortcomings, demand that every difficult experience redeem itself by becoming a useful paragraph. Even the claim that everything is material can grow teeth. Must I make something from every hurt before I’m allowed to have lived through it?

Writing helps when it gives experience time and room. When I can put down something unresolved without immediately making it support a better story about me. Some days the honest sentence is simply that I’m tired. The next sentence doesn’t have to turn tiredness into wisdom.

I want that freedom in front of the glass as well.

The man who has carried me

I can’t simply reject the mirror. Something in me still wants reconciliation with the visible self, with the face and body, with the man in the glass who has carried me through all of it.

Because he has carried me.

Through Newark beginnings and Army dreams. Through fatherhood, work, marriage and uncertainty. Through all the different costumes of becoming. Through the years when I didn’t call myself a writer and the years when I finally did. Through the long apprenticeship of learning that freedom isn’t just escape, but the courage to inhabit your own life without flinching.

I can know all that and still dislike a photograph. An insight doesn’t necessarily survive first contact with the bathroom light. I don’t want to turn reconciliation into another standard I’m failing to meet: now I must age gracefully, love every line and demonstrate enlightened gratitude for my changing body.

Some changes are losses. Some things become harder. I can grieve that without putting the whole of myself on trial. I can want to be healthier, stronger or better rested without using contempt to get myself there. Care has plenty to do without recruiting cruelty as its supervisor.

So I’m interested in changing the question.

Instead of asking only how I look, I can ask what this face has witnessed. Instead of beginning with what’s wrong with the body, I can remember what it has carried. And instead of measuring myself against the man I once meant to become, I can ask what kind of man is still trying to emerge through me now.

That last question gives me somewhere to go. The younger man’s plans don’t have to govern every remaining year. He wanted things I still want. He also wanted things whose cost he couldn’t yet imagine. I can honour his hunger without letting him run the whole household.

The face isn’t a failed advertisement for youth. It’s the face I have now. There’s history in it, though I need to be careful here too: lines aren’t proof of wisdom, any more than tired eyes are proof of failure. The body doesn’t owe me a beautiful metaphor to justify its existence. It gets to be a body.

I still like the idea of the face as a little mirror of the deep within. Something of a person becomes visible there. But no glance can contain a whole interior life, and that includes my own glance at myself. I don’t know everything about the man looking back. There are things he hasn’t yet found words for. Things he’ll discover only by leaving the room and living the next part.

There you are

Perhaps reconciliation begins with a less ambitious encounter.

To stand there in the morning and not summon the monster. To look at the man looking back and say: there you are.

Not there you are, you disappointment. Not there you are, you unfinished improvement project. Not there you are, you should have been more by now.

Just: there you are.

The words don’t require admiration. They don’t ask me to deny what hurts or pretend the years haven’t passed. They let recognition happen before assessment. For a moment, nobody needs to earn his place in the room.

I want to see whether I can let that moment be enough. Whether I can meet the visible edge of this much deeper life without demanding a verdict, then get on with inhabiting it. There are still things I want to write. Places I want to walk. People whose faces I’d rather be looking at than monitoring my own.

The monster may have something else to say tomorrow. I don’t imagine one essay will put it out of work.

But I can rinse the toothpaste from the sink. Put the toothbrush down. Leave before the inspection is finished.

If this post gave you something to carry into your day, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee or making a monthly donation or subscribing (free) to the blog.

Silent Lucidity: What My Dreams Are Teaching Me at Fifty-Eight

by

I woke on my fifty-eighth birthday with a song playing in my head.

It wasn’t coming through the speakers, a radio alarm, or a playlist left running overnight. It had crossed over from that porous place between sleep and waking where a fragment of dream, a mood, or a sentence sometimes lingers before the day closes the gate on the night.

The song was Queensrÿche’s Silent Lucidity.

I hadn’t listened to it the night before. As far as I know, nothing in the previous day had planted it there. Yet the chorus was waiting when I opened my eyes.

Some mornings you shrug and get on with things. On others, the imaginal world taps you on the shoulders and demand your attention.

Fifty-eight is a threshold. I have spent much of the summer writing about the space between stories, the interval after an old identity has loosened and before the next one has found its shape. Now the threshold has moved from the page into the room.

A birthday makes you look both ways: back across the life you’ve already lived and forward into the stretch you cannot see. I had been thinking about identity, imagination, will, and the ways I keep parts of myself at a safe intellectual distance. Then I woke with a song about dream control, inner walls, another chance, and learning to become the guide.

I decided to stay with it.

The instruction hidden inside the song

Silent Lucidity 1 begins as a lullaby addressed to someone frightened by a bad dream. The voice offers reassurance: you are safe in bed; the mind created the pain; the day is waiting. Then the lyric turns on a question that could hold an entire philosophy of consciousness:

Your dream is over. Or has it just begun?

The song opens a doorway in that question. The dreamer is invited back into the night world with greater awareness, able to face fear, retrace the years, and ride the movements of the mind rather than be carried helplessly by them.

Halfway through, the music makes room for a spoken instruction. Visualise the dream. Record it in the present tense. Put it into permanent form. Persist, and dream control may follow.

First comes imagination: hold the image. Then language: write it as present reality. Then form: give the experience somewhere durable to live. Finally, persistence: return until lucidity becomes a capacity rather than a lucky accident.

This sequence feels familiar. An image arrives during a walk, in a dream, through a song, or in the quiet before my phone comes alive. I write it down. The note enters the vault. Later it meets another fragment, an old memory, a tarot card, a conversation, a book. Over time, the material may gather enough weight to enter the world as a blog post, an essay, or a practice.

The song contains another voice too, the one promising to watch over the dreamer and help them see it through. I could hear that voice in several ways: a lover, a daemon, a higher self, a guardian of the threshold, or perhaps the lucid part of consciousness speaking to the frightened part still caught inside the dream.

The promise has a limit. The watcher accompanies and protects, but the dreamer still has to learn to become the guide.

That felt like the birthday message.

The gap between knowing and living

Before I touched the tarot deck, I opened my journal.

I wrote that the past month had brought a sense of consolidation, a stripping away of identities. They weren’t necessarily false identities. Many had protected me. They gave me ways to approach parts of myself before I was ready to stand inside them without explanation.

Writer, philosopher, magician, teacher, coach, shamanic wanderer: each name gave something within me a temporary body. I had recently been experimenting with archetypal invocation, deliberately borrowing a larger figure and then returning the borrowed face. Perhaps some of these identities had served in the same way. They gave me access to qualities I could not yet approach directly.

A shield can become heavy after the battle has moved on.

I have used ideas in much the same way. Imagination and will have circled my practice for years. I know the concepts. I can talk about them, connect them to books, place them inside a tradition, compare one model with another. I had already written that you can understand everything and still not know what to do. Now the sentence has followed me into my own practice.

The understanding is there. The embodiment has lagged behind.

This is one of my oldest moves. I jump to meaning before I have stayed with the experience. I explain the image before it has had time to breathe. I reach for a book to confirm what the body already knows. Intellectualisation gives me distance, and for a while distance feels like control.

A few days earlier, I had been writing about prayer in the present tense: giving thanks for what is already here, even when it has not yet come fully into view. The idea is simple. Faith brings an image into focus; action gives it a place in the world. Yet I have often left a gap between the image and the act, as though understanding the principle were the same as practising it.

The song arrived with the missing word: persist.

I built a birthday tarot spread around its movement. What dream is over? What dream has begun? Where is the doorway? What fear guards it? Which inner wall is ready to fall? What watches over me? What power am I ready to claim? What gift must I bring back?

I answered each question in my journal before pulling a card.

Then I shuffled.

Come down from the tree

The first card, the dream that is over, was the Hanged Man.

There he was, suspended between worlds, seeing from another angle, haloed by the insight his inversion had given him. The Hanged Man knows how to wait. He knows surrender, patience, sacrifice, and the strange knowledge that comes when ordinary orientation is turned upside down.

He cannot walk anywhere while he is hanging from the tree.

The card did not dismiss the identities I had worn or the years spent trying to understand myself through them. Their work was initiatory. They had helped me see. The halo suggested that something had been learned.

The instruction I heard was plain: come down now.

The next card was the Page of Wands, answering the question of what new dream has begun. The Page stood alone in an open landscape, studying the living wand in his hands as if it had just spoken.

He has no syllabus, no credential, no approved definition of what a writer should be. He has contact with the signal.

A few weeks earlier, I had found myself asking, why am I waiting to be asked? The Page returned the question in another language. The wand was already in his hands.

This was the writer I had been moving towards through the weblog and the Textual Underground: a writer led by his own inner guide, willing to follow what glows before he can explain where it leads. Writing as encounter. Writing as a way of seeing. Writing that does not have to submit an application to the imagined tribunal of real writers before it begins.

The Hanged Man and the Page made a clean pair. One had completed the long apprenticeship of suspension. The other was ready to walk into the desert carrying one live piece of fire.

Giving imagination a material home

For the doorway, I drew the King of Pentacles.

I had expected something airy or mystical because I had written about meditation and spending more time in the imaginal. Instead, the cards placed a mature ruler of the material world at the gate.

The King sharpened the practice. Meditation may open the door, but embodiment keeps the passage honest. Does the imaginal encounter change the day? Does it become a paragraph, a decision, a ritual, a boundary, a conversation? Does the vision enter the body and the room? Can it survive contact with the calendar?

The vault, the blog, the notebook, the chair where I meditate, the walk, the hour I protect for writing: these are part of the magical apparatus. Imagination needs somewhere to land.

Two months earlier, another tarot spread had given me a sentence I wrote down and, apparently, had not finished learning: the way out of the head is through the hands.

The King of Pentacles suggests that command is less about issuing grand declarations to the universe than tending the conditions. Return to the practice. Give the image weight.

Then came the Three of Pentacles as the fear at the threshold. The card shows a craftsperson presenting work to robed figures who hold the plans. It landed directly on something I had written before the draw: my habit of looking to people who supposedly know the way, my desire to appear smart, and my fear that my peers will not take me seriously.

The figures with the plans form an internal tribunal. Will they approve of what I am building? Do they decide whether the work is legitimate?

There is another fear beneath the fear of judgement. If I no longer require their permission, the responsibility returns to me. I have to decide what faithful work looks like. I have to enter the cathedral as a craftsperson rather than an applicant.

Back in June, my morning pages had framed the same problem more bluntly: Can I give myself permission to live as the person I already am before the market confirms it? The robed figures seemed to be holding that question along with their plans.

The books and the chains

The fifth position asked which wall I had built within. I drew the Devil.

Before the draw, I had written about my obsession with books. I have collected them for years, loved them, lived among them, carried them from house to house. That love is genuine. Another story has wound itself through it.

Someone who reads a lot of books is smart. Being smart was one route to my mother’s approval and, in a different way, to my father’s disapproval. Books became companions, but they also became evidence. A full shelf could testify on my behalf. Finishing a book from cover to cover became a moral act. Reading challenges turned attention into badge culture: how many books did you read this year?

The Devil does not make the books evil. He reveals the contract attached to them.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith image, the figures are chained, but the chains hang loose around their necks. The bondage continues partly because it has come to feel inevitable. The same can happen when a genuine appetite becomes entangled with approval, shame, status, or proof of worth.

I do not need to renounce the library. I can withdraw from the contract.

I no longer use books to establish my right to trust my own mind.

A book can become a companion again, an occasion for thought rather than a container of information. I can read by attraction, need, pleasure, friction, or resonance. I can stop after one sentence if that sentence completes the exchange. I can abandon a book that has gone dead in my hands. The number completed can lose its authority.

The wall is not made of books. It is built from the belief that intelligence must be demonstrated before direct experience can be trusted.

The watcher above the doorway

I had left the sixth journal position blank. I wanted the deck to answer without my help: who or what watches over me?

I drew the Lovers.

An angel appeared above two exposed human figures.

The Lovers and the Devil became the axis of the spread. Both cards show a pair beneath a greater being. In one, the pair is chained inside an unconscious arrangement. In the other, they stand openly beneath a blessing. Choice is no longer governed by fear, appetite, inherited contracts, or the need for approval.

The guardian appeared as the capacity to choose in alignment with what I love, rather than as another authority telling me what to believe.

That brought me back to the voice in the song: the one smiling beside the dreamer in silent lucidity, offering protection without taking away the dreamer’s agency. The daemon may not need another elaborate identity through which to reach me. It may be enough to notice what has life, what carries heat, what asks to be made, and what leaves me more present after I choose it.

Remember what you love. Choose from there.

Return to the bench, then release the work

The seventh card asked what power I was ready to claim. I had written: imagination and will, exercised consciously, daily, consistently.

The card was the Eight of Pentacles.

A craftsperson sits at the bench, making one pentacle after another. There is no lightning bolt or claim of instant mastery. Whatever magic the card contains is found in the return.

Choose an image. Enter it. Write it in the present tense. Give it form. Come back tomorrow.

The Page of Wands receives the signal. The Eight of Pentacles gives it disciplined form. The final card in the spread, the Eight of Wands, releases it. The wands are already flying across open country. The insight cannot remain forever in meditation, private understanding, or the well-organised chambers of the vault. It must travel.

This is the danger of a beautiful archive: the underground can become another form of suspension. I can keep linking, arranging, refining, and preparing while the work waits below the surface.

The underground needs exits.

Enough swords

I drew one more card from the bottom of the deck and placed it across the Eight of Pentacles. I called it the Lucid Card. Its question was simple: what will help me recognise the moment I leave direct experience and retreat into intellectualisation?

The Ten of Swords.

It was the only Sword in the spread, the only card belonging to thought, analysis, mental narrative, and interpretation. It arrived as the alarm.

I know the feeling of the swords accumulating. One explanation becomes another. One reference leads to another book. The experience gets pinned beneath interpretation. The mind insists it must understand everything before I can trust the encounter or act upon it.

The Ten shows that process reaching exhaustion. Nothing more needs to be added.

The cue for lucidity is overkill. When I catch myself explaining the encounter before inhabiting it, constructing an identity around it, looking for an authority to certify it, or reaching for another book instead of staying with what happened, I can recognise the dream.

Enough swords. Wake up.

The image looks grim, but dawn is visible on the horizon. That took me back to where the morning began: a bad dream spinning in the head, then daylight, another chance, and the question of whether the dream has ended or only just begun.

The spread began with the Hanged Man and became lucid through the Ten of Swords. Both figures are immobilised. One has spent long enough seeing the world upside down. The other lies beneath the accumulated products of mind.

No eleventh sword is required.

Crossing the threshold

I do not know what my fifty-eighth year will bring. That is part of the threshold. A doorway loses something when we pretend to know the room on the other side.

I know how I want to cross it.

I want to come down from the tree and follow the living signal. I want to give imagination a material home. I want to notice when the internal tribunal gathers and continue working without waiting for its verdict. I want books to be companions rather than witnesses for the defence. I want to practise at the bench, then let what I make leave my hands.

The Ten of Swords gives me a reality check for the year. When thought begins to replace contact, I can return to feet, breath, room, light, sound. I can write one present-tense sentence about what is here. Then I can take one material action.

Close the book and open the notebook. Walk outside. Write the paragraph. Send the message. Release the post.

The practice needs contact with the world.

The song that crossed the border with me on my birthday offered a practice disguised as a power ballad: visualise the dream, record it, persist, become the guide. The cards answered with their own sequence: receive the signal, give it form, let it travel, and wake when the mind tries to bury the living thing beneath explanation.

So this is how I enter the year:

I come down from the tree.
I follow the living signal.
I give imagination a material home.
I release the need for external certification.
I remove the chains between knowledge and worth.
I choose according to what I love.
I return daily to the bench.
I let the work travel.
When the tenth sword falls, I wake.

In sigil form:

The day has begun. The dream is still alive.

  1. ↩︎

Silent Lucidity

Hush now, don’t you cry
Wipe away the teardrop from your eye
You’re lying safe in bed
It was all a bad dream spinning in your head

Your mind tricked you to feel the pain
Of someone close to you leaving the game of life
So here it is, another chance
Wide awake you face the day, your dream is over
Or has it just begun?

There’s a place I like to hide
A doorway that I run through in the night
Relax child, you were there
But only didn’t realize and you were scared

It’s a place where you will learn
To face your fears, retrace the years
And ride the whims of your mind
Commanding in another world
Suddenly you hear and see this magic new dimension

will be watching over you
(I) am gonna help you see it through
(I) will protect you in the night
(I) am smiling next to you, in silent lucidity

I can’t do this
Visualize your dream, record it in the present tense
Put it into a permanent form
If you persist in your efforts, you can achieve dream control
How’s that then, better?
Dream control, dream control
Help me

If you open your mind for me
You won’t rely on open eyes to see
The walls you built within
Come tumbling down, and a new world will begin

Living twice at once, you learn
You’re safe from the pain in the dream domain
A soul set free to fly
A round trip journey in your head
Master of illusion, can you realize
Your dream’s alive, you can be the guide but

will be watching over you
(I) am gonna help you see it through
(I) will protect you in the night
(I) I’m smiling next to you

The air has changed. I almost don’t want …

by

The air has changed.

I almost don’t want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn’t cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where did the summer go?

Weathered stone ruins and bare branches beneath a heavy grey sky, with dry grass in the foreground.

Thinking often changes like this. I keep circling a question, carrying it from the desk to the path and back again, until one morning I realise I am no longer asking it from the same place.

For the past week the question has been: What is my practice?

The useful version of that question reaches beneath my work, my products and whatever skills I can put on a page. It asks what I am cultivating day after day, whether anybody notices or not.

The internet muddies the answer. I understand the marketplace and its machinery. If I want people to find my work, I have to make it visible. The platforms reward recognisable openings, familiar pacing and proven formats. Success leaves footprints, and the rest of us follow them until even originality begins to look as though it came from a template.

Every time I start thinking too strategically about “content”, I feel my attention detach from the thing that made me want to write. I start positioning rather than wondering. I ask, Will this perform? before I ask, Is this true?

These morning walks have been teaching me another rhythm. Walking, talking aloud, letting a thought find its pace somewhere between footstep and breath. I rarely leave the house with a destination for the thinking. The walk is the thinking. By the time I return, I know something I couldn’t reach by sitting still and pressing harder on the question.

July’s thirty-one days of blogging did something similar. It began as a challenge, became a habit, then asked to be treated as a practice. A challenge has a finish line. A habit can run without much presence. A practice asks me to turn up and meet the day that is here, with whatever quality of attention I can bring to it.

The Textual Underground has been holding versions of this thought for a while. On one walk, i uncovered a useful sequence: walk, notice, record, return, write, publish a trace. Another note asked what particular world becomes available through a person’s attention. Beneath both sits the same suspicion: the work begins before the writing does.

The blog has become the public edge of that practice. It can hold a finished essay, but it can also hold a photograph, a rough connection, a sentence that hasn’t decided what it believes yet. I don’t want it to document a row of conclusions. I want it to show a consciousness moving through time, books, streets, conversations and its own recurring questions, sometimes changing its mind in public.

Attention may be the thing I am cultivating. Attention to the year turning in the air. To old stone under a heavy sky. To the conversations overheard in cafés and the books that keep talking after I have closed them. To the odd thought that arrives halfway up a hill and refuses to leave me alone.

Writing is what attention leaves behind.

The business may grow from those traces. Readers may gather around them. Some notes may become essays, workshops, books or objects I can’t see yet. But those are later forms. If I make them the source, I lose contact with the walk, the question and the part of me that still writes to discover what he thinks.

Tomorrow the air may feel ordinary again.

The Writing Life — Review Essay

by
the writing life

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)

Ask a room full of people if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, and most hands go up. It’s one of those universal fantasies — like running a restaurant or owning a vineyard. The image is appealing: the writer at the desk, the manuscript growing, the solitary genius wrestling meaning out of silence. Nobody fantasises about the blank page that won’t fill. Nobody pictures the years of work that might never be read.

Annie Dillard is not interested in the fantasy. The Writing Life is a short, strange book — more extended essay than memoir, more meditation than manual — and its apparent aim is to tell the truth about what writing actually costs. She does not want you to romanticise it. She wants you to see the cabin for what it is: a place of confinement, of daily struggle, of a life that looks from the outside like very little happening at all.

The irony, and it’s one Dillard may or may not be aware of, is that the picture she paints is deeply seductive. Not despite the difficulty but because of it. The solitary cabin by the water. The days given entirely to reading and writing. The refusal of ordinary life in service of something larger. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a fantasy. Tell me that wouldn’t sell.

This is the central paradox of the book: the more honestly she describes the writing life, the more appealing it becomes to those of us who already want it.

What she gets right, and gets right deeply, is that wanting to be a writer and wanting to write are two completely different things. The first is about identity. The hat, as she says. The second is about the actual work — the daily encounter with the sentence, the word, the impossible gap between the idea in your head and the thing on the page.

She tells an anecdote about a well-known writer asked by a student whether they could be a writer. The writer pauses, then says: “Do you like sentences?” It sounds like a joke. It isn’t. It’s the whole question compressed into four words.

Writers, Dillard argues, are formed by what they read. Poets like poetry. Novelists like novels. They dedicate themselves to the form that attracts them, study it in the people who have done it best, and learn the craft from the inside out. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Thoreau loved Homer. Faulkner acknowledged his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce. The great ones didn’t arrive fully formed — they were shaped by what they loved and returned to it obsessively. The young writer who reads nothing except their own work, who admires nothing except their own voice has confused the role for the practice.

Jack London’s formulation is the clearest she offers: every writer needs technique, experience, and a philosophical position. The first two are teachable, acquirable things you can work toward. The third is harder. It requires you to actually know what you think — not about writing, but about being alive. Most people who romanticise the writing life are missing all three. But especially the third.

I came to this book as someone who would not easily describe himself as a writer. A thinker, yes. Someone who uses writing to communicate what he thinks. But not someone who agonizes over sentences — not in prose, anyway. In poetry, it’s different: the line is the thing, and you can spend as long as it takes to find the right word because the word is what you’re actually making. But in prose I’m following an idea somewhere, and the language serves the movement rather than being the movement itself.

So Dillard’s sentence-obsession sits slightly outside my experience. I understand it. I admire it. But I don’t share it in the way she seems to require. And yet I kept reading, because the book is doing something else underneath its surface argument — something I recognise from my own practice, even if her version looks nothing like mine.

She includes a quote from Nietzsche: “When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest.” He walked for seven or eight hours at a stretch through the hills. He sometimes danced. The body in motion, the mind unleashed.

That landed. Not as a new idea but as confirmation of something I already know in my bones. My best thinking happens on a walk. Not at a desk, not staring at a screen, but in motion, talking out loud, following the thread wherever it goes. Even this essay began not as writing but as conversation — answers spoken into a microphone, ideas arriving in the saying of them rather than the typing of them. The wisdom walk is not a break from the work. It is the work.

This is where I’d gently push back on Dillard’s version of the writing life. She locates the work in the sealed-off space. The cabin. The room with the view boarded up so you can’t be distracted by the beauty outside. There is something admirable in that level of commitment. There is also something that doesn’t account for how many writers, thinkers, and philosophers have done their best work in motion, in dialogue, in the porous exchange with the world rather than in retreat from it.

Emerson walked. Nietzsche walked. Wordsworth composed entire poems on his feet, on the paths around Grasmere. The peripatetic tradition is as old as philosophy itself. Dillard knows this — she quotes Nietzsche directly — but she doesn’t follow it through to its implication. The extraordinary state she asks about, “how do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?” — there are more ways in than the desk and the closed door.

Teilhard de Chardin, whom she quotes at the very end of the book, puts it better than I can: “Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe.” That is the version of the writing life that makes sense to me. Not the retreat to the cabin but the going further in. Not less world but more world, met with more attention, digested on long walks, and talked through out loud when the ideas need air.

The fantasy I carry is not the cabin in the woods, though there are days when that sounds fine. It’s something more like this: enough time and enough freedom to spend the days reading and writing and walking, with nowhere to be and nothing to sell. Not writing for an audience or a market, but writing as Dillard describes it at its best — because you must, the way Galahad went towards the Grail, knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.

A day spent in the silent struggle while life passes you by might not look like much from the outside. But a life spent reading and writing and thinking out loud on long walks? That will be a good life.

Dillard probably agrees with that. The argument between us is only about what the room looks like.