I think that maybe the best thing about writing again is that I am accessing parts of my brain that I thought I had lost.
I have always struggled with memory, and while I knew in a way, I don’t think I fully respected how much that was linked to the trauma repair process. There’s that whole phenomenon of drunk memory - I can’t find the actual name for it now, and Google isn’t helping - but it’s similar to the idea of studying in the same place where you are going to take a test, because we encode things differently depending on context. When we revisit that context the memories rise up, bringing those impressions back to us, and back into that actionable, pre-frontal cortex space where we get to make decisions and carry out complex and coordinated behaviors in the world based on what we find.
I don’t know if I’ve ever written so consistently or so easily in my life - and it feels a bit like all sorts of memories are getting loosened, silt and pebbles and hanks of weeds coming down with the current, accumulating into new vistas built up from things I’d forgotten.
Like for example - I’ve been chewing on creative community a lot. I have ideas, I know what I want, and I think I'm feeling brave enough to try it.
But contemplation has brought back to the foreground so many other different kinds of little creative communities that I’d been part of that had fallen off the memory shelf. Like the little group of would-be writers and readers I happened on once, who would convene on the occasional Sunday morning on someone’s porch, books strewn about where everyone read quietly to themselves and if you felt compelled to, you would read the poem aloud to the room. They called it poetry church.Â
I had completely forgotten about that playful and exploratory moment in time, but last Sunday in a formal group conversation that somehow wound up mostly being about compost-and-we-as-a-culture-discarding-what-is-actually-quite-fecund-and-yes-this-is-about-poop-actually, one of the attendees connected this theme (somehow!) to the Quaker religious services they had been attending throughout the pandemic as a way of finding peace and grounding. How the basis of the service was to sit in silence, and that when someone is compelled to speak they simply do so. They said something about how it’s not really about you being the one doing the talking, but that something is rising up, and being spoken through you.
This afternoon, drowsing awake from a nap, I made the connection across years and lines that that sweet gathering had actually been fully based off Quaker practice. To sit in silence, and speak only if something moved you. Poetry church.Â
What I am looking for in the right now is definitely more about discipline and accountability and generativity and how your relationship with output changes when you know those structures are in place to support you.Â
But just to remember this unbidden, and to witness it rise up when I least expected it made me take heart that even as my memories have not always been reliable or readily available to me, it’s never meant that what was underneath that dissonant fugue was actually gone.
It’s that what was there was simply waiting on the right context to arrive.