Don't Sin Against Your Gift
Years ago, during a period of financial difficulty and Great Doubt, a wise person told me not to "sin against my gift," meaning that I need to remain true to what I am and how I am made, even when external circumstances might make that commitment seem impractical, or far-fetched, or hard to honor. Perhaps you have felt the age-old tug between the artistic side of yourself, and the sensible side that is concerned with tax bills, and bus schedules, and the brute reality of our economic lives. But we don’t write poems or essays or stories to pay the bills. This mode of being extends to all things and yet the activity itself must be understood outside of capitalism.
We write to make our lives rich with meaning, and with activity that we enjoy.
If writing doesn’t bring you into contact with experiences and sensations that you want to have and feel; if you are more troubled than anything by the process of writing even one little poem, then it’s possible that you can do without it, and perhaps would find yourself happier doing something else with your time. But if you have no choice, and must write for whatever private and holy reason, then I encourage you to always to bear in mind the deeper, inviolable reasons you write, and not fall victim to the thinking that pervades so much of our society, and says that only those things which generate income or appear legible and reasonable to others (including the tax collectors), are worth doing, because this thinking is wrongheaded and even dangerous.
To write anyway is an act of resistance, and one of the ways we can preserve some of the delicate landscapes of our inner lives from further colonization.
In her poem “Obscurity and Voyaging,” C.D. Wright says “The pen, a gift. / It has been designed to coax a scream / of beauty from a fissure / of hariness.” and I like this statement because it points to the magical power, the alchemical transformations, made possible by such a humble tool. A pen is an instrument. Your pen is meant for more than writing checks and to-do lists.
Some of us are simply meant to write and the question of Why—Why write when it won't pay the heating bill or when Syrian refugees lack for basic needs, and wouldn’t it make more sense to join an aid organization where one’s work would really amount to something?—eventually gives way to a more nuanced engagement with the question of How.
If you are called to write, and realize you don’t have much choice in the matter, you will eventually recognize, with some relief perhaps, that doing and making your art eventually quiets the mind that seeks reasons for that which you may never find a rational or satisfying answer. It has its own reasons. There is a larger purpose unfolding in all of us. Larger than taxes and current events. Larger than our own ability to make sense of it a great deal of the time. Larger than what it means to anyone else. More precious, too.
And so we coax and coax and beauty screams forth.
If you've wandered off to do other things, now that the ground has thawed, but miss having a steady stream of poetry in your life, I want to recommend a simple daily practice that will honor your gift. Choose a book from your shelf that you've been wanting to read, and see what it's like to enjoy even one poem a day, perhaps with your morning cuppa. Try it for a week and let me know how it feels.
—Holly Wren Spaulding, March 2023