There Is a Boatman to Carry Us Across the River

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February 16, 2010

This article by Gloria Wendroff offers another way of understanding the zone that artists, athletes, and writers talk about, that place where the flow is so smooth and strong that it feels like it isn’t just you any more, that you have gotten out of the way and something else has taken over. Most of us experience these “in the zone” moments, and seek for ways to re-create them. The added beauty of this type of writing is that it creates a profound meditation on that mysterious relationship between God and Self. If we go deeply enough into our unconscious, will we find a place where there is no distinction?  If God lives in our hearts, then perhaps all we have to do is listen to our hearts to hear God.  Gloria illuminates a path of inquiry through experience, and a way of accessing a richness that is just beyond our normal consciousness.

–Chamaigne Montana, Writers’ Voices Producer and Co-Host

A note from Gloria:

This article contains some of my experience and delight in Godwriting™ as well as the first Godwriting of three people in varied parts of the world. This article isn’t meant to be an instruction manual, nor can it be. Godwriting is more like Narnia. There isn’t a map. You can only go there!

There Is a Boatman to Carry Us Across the River

I always wanted to be a writer. After all, books were my parents. Books fed me, raised me, taught me ideals and gave me hidden clues as to who I might be.

For so many years, I wrote and wrote and rewrote. I was adept at moving words around, but the fact is I didn’t have much to say, and no knack for thinking up plots either. My writing was primarily moving words around. I could rewrite a line of poetry until three in the morning and not get it right. None of this kept me from writing, however – over and over again. There is something about writing –  hard or easy – we have to do it.

I remember craving someone to come along who would give me a plot or theme to write about!

Incredibly, about forty years later, it was like the Greatest Storyteller of All came into my heart and did tell me exactly what to say. No plots however, though my life itself began to hold the twists and turns that fiction writers dream of.

What I call Godwriting, the Voice for God, you might call Higher Consciousness, Inner Voice, Spirit or Divine-writing, this writing from our pens or our laptops at its inspired best – sometimes, but not always — galloping out of us so fast we can hardly keep up with the words of this miraculous writing that come from “somewhere.”

Every day for twelve years, I have been Godwriting™ and sending out the messages I receive to subscribers all over the world and from all walks of life. Twelve years is over 4,000 days! Gradually, over time, I discovered a side benefit –  ALL of my writing got faster and easier!

I didn’t have to do the endless rewriting and moving lines around and going back and forth. My writing became, well, spontaneous. From business letters to poetry to blog to newsletter, pretty much all of my writing takes care of itself now without struggle.

The easy God-given writing I’m doing now is spiritual. But fiction books have been written in the same or similar way. Fannie Flag did not take credit for writing Fried Green Tomatoes. It was an inspired book that came to her. All she had to do was to let it come.

In writing down The Heart of a Gopi, Raihana Tyabji wrote as fast as he could the words he heard whispered from somewhere deep inside. He didn’t know what was going to happen next any more than a reader of a book knows until he turns the page.

Mother Theresa said: “I am a little pencil in God’s hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. And He writes beautifully.”

Naturally, the writing I speak of comes from a deeper level of truth than our surface knowing or effort. This writing is effortless. It has to be effortless, or it would not be Godwriting. Godwriting cannot be forced. But it can be invited. And once in a while, when we’re lucky, it comes unbidden.

God is the boatman Who ferries us across the river of writing. But to get to the shore of the river, we have to move ourselves over to where the Boatman so patiently waits to take us across.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat, Love, Pray, tells how she got to the river bank while she was sitting on the bathroom floor in despair. Despair and her bathroom floor got her there.

We don’t have to sit on the bathroom floor, nor do we have to be in despair. To hear on this deep level, we don’t have to be anything at all but what we are. A subtle sense of sound, an inner hearing, comes to the fore, and we take a backseat. It’s like we turn the dial of our mind ever so slightly, the same way we fine-tune the dial on a radio station, and the static goes away.

I love what Elizabeth Gilbert writes. Furthermore, I loved the talk she gave on Ted’s Place. www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html. Elizabeth tells how genius used to mean a creative spirit that shares the room we write in. In those times, the writer wasn’t a genius. The writer had a genius. The writer couldn’t take the credit. It was understood that all great writing was inspired writing. Today the typical belief is that only a rare person is a genius. In contrast, Elizabeth Gilbert is sure that every one of us has a genius.

I agree with her. I have seen it. I have seen this shift come about in Godwriting workshops across the U.S. and in Greece, Turkey, England, Romania, Germany, and Israel where the publishers from three of those countries, miraculously paid my way so that people in their countries could be introduced to this deep-level writing and come closer to God and all that greater closeness brings with it. Everywhere people, writers and non-writers, found themselves writing down amazing wisdom in their own unique style of writing.

I would like to emphasize that it takes no special talent to Godwrite. It comes from the deeper levels that exist within each one of us. Everyone can plumb those levels. All we have to do is to leave the shores of the known and enter the beautiful and vast Unknown.

At the same time, I’m amazed that Godwriting came to me.  When I really think about it, I can’t quite believe it.  For so many years, I have been receiving beautiful Heavenletters™, and still it hasn’t quite sunk in. That I actually Godwrite seems like one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Yet I know it’s an ordinary process and what is really surprising is that we haven’t been doing this all along.

Here are incredible samples of the first Godwriting samples of three people, one from Fairfield, Iowa, one from Italy, and one from a gentleman in South America who took the Godwriting workshop in Romania!

J., a young woman in Fairfield was positive that she would not be able to Godwrite. She was so sure she couldn’t. Here is her first Godwriting:

J. to God:

Dear God, why am I having so many problems in my personal relationships?

God:

You are not having problems in your relationships. You are reaching out to encompass the world and, in that, losing the identities of those around you. They are as you of mind and body. Free as blossoms floating in air on wind.

Accept all occasions as waves or currents meeting in an ocean, touching and whispering to one another in certain directions but ultimately letting each take their own paths. Love is not lost. Feelings do not change. The heart loves. But as atoms move in the air, so do all mankind.

The following is from a single mother in Italy. Naturally, she heard God in her native Italian. For our benefit, Pitta has translated her first Godwriting from Italian into English. Pitta lets nothing hold her back.

Pitta to God:

My dear God, words one on another and I try to capture them and write them on my paper, and your words more fast than ever. Wonderful, it remembers to me what I have always wish in my life. But words are limits, words close every expressed concept where in imagination is more vast. Meet us here, in that point, where I am aware that You are me.

God to Pitta:

We can talk for all Eternity. I have much time, so you. Meet us on the paper, wonderful, yes. Words close, you tell. They could. But when we meet, also in words, your heart beats in a different way and so doesn’t exist closing. Everything can close or can be an instrument.

Now I give you a secret, a secret not for all yet. Men ask to Me: “God, oh my God what I have to do?”

But they are deaf, because I always reply. “YOU, tell me what YOU want to do, and I will do.”

Men ask Me what they have to do and they complain because I don’t reply them. I say: YOU, YOU, what You want to do? YOU, creator of your life, builder of your creations, what do you want? YOU who have all my instruments, YOU what do you want? What do you want to conclude, obtain, create, reach for? How do you want to mold this unarmed material in your hands?

I AM GOD and I will do all you want. Surprise? Shocking? Thinking well. Isn’t like this that world has gone on during all the time? What, what do you wait again? What signs do you want more? Look around, isn’t full, fullness, the measure of signs? Why do you think I am the responsible when things happen?

YOU tell me what you want, and I will occur for you. If you come wrong doesn’t matter. I am well-disposed to begin forever, infinity times. If it would not be so, if you couldn’t free choice, if I lay down the law, where it could be the Truth We have talk about? How could be the perfect Love? Perfect Love means perfect freedom.

Oneness, if oneness have to really be, doesn’t know Chief. Upsetting? So it is, or it would be not Oneness at all.

Santhan from South America is a yogi, and he refers to God as Bhagavan. In this Godwriting, God talks about Godwriting itself.

Santhan to Bhagavan:

There is an impulse to write.

Bhagavan to Santhan:

You hesitated to write your name, just as you hesitate to write these very words down, wondering who is it that’s writing. I too am Wondering. I am Wondering at the beauty of the moment.

We, and that is to say We in reference to the feeling of you and I, slowly melt into the I.

It’s like lying on the beach on a bright sunny day, with My Sun aligned at the perfect angle with the water so that He shines My Light to reflect on the water in such brilliance that everything is Light. You, the water, the sun and the light all become One.

So it is with Godwriting. We all flow together. All in awe and wonder of our Oneness.

The shower, the blessing of rain that I send you now, those miraculous sparkles of water that I send from the Heaven, the pitter pat of them falling on the tin roof next door, that sound which arises from their falling, the breeze that tickles the leaves in the tree and drifts in through your window to nudge the door which creaks, “Hello!”

The distant rumble of thunder, like a grunt of an old wise sheep dog, the big smile on your beautiful face. They all rejoice and share and bring together a symphony of this miraculous moment.

For the first time you write for your Self. You write for Me. The words flow from you, and you stare with glistening eyes of wonder (and the big smile) at these words that pour out. Fun, isn’t it? Yes, that is all I wish. This practice is a taste of Oneness experiencing Oneness.

The rains flow from the heavens, My heaven, your heaven, My clouds, your clouds, onto the ground, trees roofs and wet sheep dogs.

Oh, yes, it’s pouring now. That is flow. This is flow. It is flow from the Light within. The Light whispers. I whisper. I always whisper. My whisper is a song. I am the vibration, the composer and the instrument. I am experiencing your writing for Me Who is you.

All resistance will soon dissolve as our communication deepens and becomes more consistent. As you learn to look towards the Light within, the flow intensifies. At a certain point which we may call a threshold, you and I are One. It’s where you jump off the cliff. You let go completely to Me. Your awareness dissolves into the Light.

When the desire for Oneness to experience Oneness arises again, you return to awareness of your experiencing Me, yet you will still be flying.

So, beloved, you have begun Godwriting. Hear me, the Old Sheep Dog, chanting My song from the Heavens. Hear Me blessing you with rain. Wonderful, isn’t it? It’s the beauty of following your heart. It comes from an impulse. Like the impulse you have to climb up the stairs and stand on the roof right now. Go.

I am wowed by the writing of brand-new Godwriters.

What I’ve written here barely touches on Godwriting. So many questions remain. Why aren’t we already Godwriting? Why Godwrite? How is Godwriting different from automatic writing, free writing, inner child writing, and channeling? How do we know Godwriting isn’t just our own writing? How much do the two hemispheres of the brain have to do with Godwriting? What do Einstein, St. Catherine of Siena, Bernie Siegel, M.D., Melvin Morse, M.D, the Kaballah. and a Nobel Peace Prize winner have to say that relate to the process I call Godwriting?

Here’s my website:  www.heavenletters.org

And here’s my blog:www.godwriting.org


In both places, you can find out more about Godwriting. You are also invited to post your questions and comments anywhere on either site, and I — and others — will respond to you right underneath your comment.

What good fortune comes up for you? Click to be WOWED!
http://www.heavenletters.org/random-heavenletter-universe.html

____________________________________________________________________________

“Come Play with Me!”

Godwriting™ Workshop in Fairfield, Iowa

Know the Heart of God — Discover God’s Words Personally Meant for You

“Take a moment now to feel My love. It is in you and around you. It is of you. It is your loveness meeting My loveness. We become a string that twangs in the joy of its One Self…”
Heaven Sutra # 211 – Supreme Oneness of Love

Saturday, February 20 and Saturday, February 27  12:30 P.M. to 5 P.M.
1 Workshop 2 Consecutive Sessions. Both Sessions Required for Good Journey.
703 E. Burlington Avenue, Fairfield, Iowa

Email gloria [at] Heavenletters [dot] org  Call 1 773 979 0083
http://www.heavenletters.org/godwriting.html

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On the road again a writing journey by Carol Bodensteiner

October 10, 2009

When I take a trip, I like to travel with someone. It’s enlightening to have another person’s perspective, to see things through someone else’s eyes, to be encouraged to go a little further when I might have given up. Writing is a journey on which I also benefit from having others travel with me.

A decade ago, I struck out on a new road, a journey of creative writing. A 30-year career in public relations ensured that I wrote plenty, but business writing and creative writing are quite different ventures. Business writing is a bit like going to the convenience store.  Get in, get out, quickly, concisely, and persuasively. In less than one page if at all possible. Creative writing, on the other hand, is more like a road trip on which you spend hours exploring some unexpected hole-in-the-wall museum. A five-minute experience may expand across pages.

I’ve been fortunate to have many travelers join me on this journey.  Many have been short term tour guides who helped me explore aspects of creative writing ranging from humor to personal essay, from ‘taking a smaller picture’ to developing extended metaphors.  These knowledgeable guides joined me through well-known programs like the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City and various writing seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They also include a rich underground writing culture in my own backyard in Des Moines. Workshops held in home basements and church halls, places where other travelers gathered to explore prose styles, spiritual memoir, and story telling.

All these tour guides not only added to the suitcase of tools I use in my writing, but also expanded my awareness of myself and the meaning of my life experiences. The perspectives gained in these workshops have been as eye opening as those I gain seeing other cultures during travels through foreign countries. I have come away from every workshop experience inspired to keep on exploring, keep on writing.

Equally important, from the early days of my writing career, has been the chance to hook up with like-minded fellow travelers who have been an ongoing source of insight and encouragement. Several of us formed a writing group that agreed to meet every two weeks to share our writing. With very few breaks, we have kept to that schedule for nearly five years.  While some members have come and gone and come back again, two of us have held the core together.

This writing buddy and I spent four days this summer sequestered at LaCorsette Maison Inn, a wonderful bed and breakfast in Newton, Iowa. Our intent was to write, and write we did.
After an early morning walk and breakfast provided by our hosts, we applied ‘butt glue’ (one of my favorite terms picked up at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and also known as dedicated effort) and applied our fingers and our minds to our keyboards for the rest of the morning.

Endless cups of coffee later – along about noon – we printed out the fruits of our labor, read each other’s work, and provided feedback. Then we headed back to the computers to continue writing through the afternoon, until ‘the sun was over the yardarm,’ as my friend who spent years sailing said, and it was time for cocktails. Which we usually sipped as we continued to write, throw out plot challenges, and work through possible solutions.

The outcome of this concentrated block of time was that we each brought home greater understanding of our characters and the stories we are creating, in addition to several chapters of new writing.

Our hosts joked that they could market retreats like ours as ‘Writer’s Blocks.’ I like it! Instead of viewing writer’s block as a problem, now I will think about writer’s block as the solution. It’s all in the perspective. New learning gained from traveling another road.

The result of my writing journey has been gratifying. I published a memoir in 2008, as did my writing buddy. My stories about growing up on a family farm in the middle of the country in the middle of the 20th Century have sent me on another journey to learn the ins and outs of book publishing, distribution and promotion.

What I have been learning on that journey, I have been able to share with my friend who subsequently published her memoir about leaving a secure job on Wall Street to sail around the world. A journey, I can imagine and live through her writing.

My creative writing journey is far from over. The world offers endless places to see, writing offers limitless worlds to explore.  I trust I will have travel companions to ensure I make the most of both.

Carol Bodensteiner is the author of Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, a memoir published in 2008. She writes from the acreage near Des Moines where she lives with her husband. Her website is www.carolbodensteiner.com

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Staying in the Scene

October 10, 2009

I’ve been attending writing workshops and taking writing classes off and on for many years, in an effort to improve my skills as I write a novel.  Often, I fear, I sign up for a workshop thinking that it will give me a deadline and thus motivate me to get more writing done; the reality is that the class itself becomes a way I can convince myself that I am doing something to make progress with my writing without actually having to spend the time writing.  Even so, I almost always get something useful from the class; something that truly does improve my writing.

One of the most significant points that I have learned came from a week-long workshop I took at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival in 2007. The class was titled “Novel Solutions” – we writers love plays on words, don’t we  – taught by Wayne Johnson.  I got a lot of feedback on the 18-page excerpt from my novel in progress.  Much of it ws positive, which I really needed.  But there was plenty of criticism as well.  As is always the case, I didn’t feel all of the criticism was valid, but there was one point that kept coming up that finally made me aware of a major flaw in my writing.

I needed to learn to stay with the scene to the end.

I could set the scene.  I wrote vivid detail, employing all the senses. I used strong verbs to bring the action to life.  And then, just as things were getting really interesting for my readers, I summed the rest of the action up in a sentence or two of narrative and moved on.  Or worse yet, I left it for my readers to figure out what actually happened.

I thought I was being clever. I had convinced myself that it was a deliberate style choice, that it fit with my writing aspiration – to tell the story in as few words as possible, each word conveying maximum meaning.  Spare, yet rich.  Like Hemingway perhaps. (Okay, I said it was an aspiration.)  I wanted to give the reader enough to stimulate her imagination , then let her fill in the blanks.  Isn’t that more interesting than being given the entire picture?

What my first readers told me was, no it’s not.  When I painted a scene, I brought the reader into it with me.  By leaving  them there abruptly, I wasn’t being clever.  I was being lazy.  When I examined the parts of my manuscript where I had done this, I realized that I had stopped writing in the middle of the scene because I wasn’t sure how to get to the end!  Like many things in life, the only way out is through.  I had to stay there with my characters until the end.

Here’s an example.  My character, Miranda, is an Iowa farm girl in the 1930’s.  She has gone to town with her father and in the general store dressing room tries on a ready-made dress that she has been admiring for weeks.

The dressing room was lit by a single electric bulb and a small window of etched glass high above her head.  There was a mirror, tall and narrow, that produced a slightly waverying reflection.  In the unfamiliar light, Miranda stared at herself in this mirror.  She was fourteen years old and fully grown in height, but thin, with hips that were still slim and breasts that were small, high and firm, but this dress, this beautiful soft green dress, made her feel like a woman.   She twisted her shoulders, first one way, then the other, and back and forth until her whole body was twisting, and the full skirt swirled around, rising and then falling again to graze her calf.  Finally she spun completely around, and the skirt rose almost parallel to the floor to make a full circle, brushing all four sides of the small room before falling gently into place.

Miranda had been taking the extra eggs into town every Friday morning before school for six months, and she had saved just barely enough money to buy the dress.  She wore it to church the very next day, and she was sure that everyone looked at her differently than they had before.

The reaction I got from the workshop was – “I loved the scene in the dressing room , but why did you stop?  I want to see Miranda buy the dress.”  My solution was to mention the egg moneybefore she actually gets to the store, and replace that last paragaph with this one:

Miranda carried the dress to the front of the store and placed it gently on the high oak counter.   The clerk, whose every grey hair was tucked neatly into her bun, peered over her glasses at Miranda, her gaze moving from Miranda’s curly slightly mussed hair to her obviously homemade white blouse.

            “I’d like to buy this dress,” Miranda said.

After that workshop, I re-read my entire manuscript and found multiple instances where I stopped in the middle of the scene, or sometimes just a few moments too early.  Learning to stay in the scene has definitely improved my writing.

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Why We Write

October 10, 2009

“Imagine! The power of writing what’s truly on your mind.  What you really see, think, and feel.  Rather than what you are told you should think, see, and feel.  It causes a revolution – or at the very least, a damn fine poem.”  So writes Natalie Goldberg, in Old Friend from Far Away, in reference to, and deference to, her old friend and teacher Allen Ginsberg and his revolutionary poem “Howl.”

Just last month, Times Books published “Why Women Have Sex,” which details over 200 reasons that women admit to, from relieving boredom to relieving a headache, with lots of permutations of relieving her partner.  “Because I want to” must be in there somewhere.  237 reasons, but when you examine them closely they are all variations on just a few themes:  connection, spirituality, money, prestige, self-expression.  Aren’t the reasons we write variations on those same themes?

Or is it all love?  In Old Friend from Far Away, Natalie Goldberg reveals writing’s deep, light secret.  In the essay “The Four-Letter Word” she writes:

Being in love is a loss of control.  Suddenly your life is dependent on the eyebrow twitch of Joe Schmo. It’s terrible – it’s thrilling. Everyone wants it.

No one says it but writing induces that state of love.  The oven shimmers, the faucet radiates, you die into the mouth that only you see.  Right there, sitting with your notebook on your lap… Your life is real.  it has texture, detail.  Suddenly it springs alive.

Why do you write?

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