When did we become unclear? When did we lose it? When did the distinction between what we were doing and where we are going become unclear? Is it that there is something lost? There are many people that I encounter on a daily basis; those that love me and those that hate me. There is a great distinction between the two as those that love me love me but those that hate me make it known to the world. It is not that I care either way but that I do care for the distinction to be known. Aside from this the one that I encountered this evening is one that I love and he loves me. He is like my little brother. He teaches me as much as I teach him. This time I was teaching him but I learned from him as well.

I was described a problem that he had been facing to do with writing. He could no longer, by his description, let go and write as he once had. It was almost as if he lacked the meditative approach that writing requires. It was a complete loss of what I would refer to as the meditative, loving response to writing inherent in all of us by nature. He had lost that ability to let go, to write. I coined a phrase because of this dissention to his writing last night as well as a method to get back into writing. It is all based off of feeling.

The phrase that I coined off of him last night was this: I live to write, I write to live. I love to write, I write to love. My passion...my voice resides there. Knowing me is to know the words. The words that drive me...that were driven from me… This is how I feel about writing and the works that I have written. These are the words that I write with love, passion, anger stricken out onto the pages. I analyzed his problem only to find that something between his brain and his fingers was no longer allowing the words to be forged within his mind and formed into the dancing images that would later fill his pages. The passion was lost, there was something amiss. Through conversation with him I saw that what was missing was his ability to release the internal conversations that indulged his criticisms of his own work…these new conversation were willfully filling the voids, the expanses within his thoughts, both conscious and subconscious, that are needed for his expanding imagination to grow and to develop. Much like a child within the mother’s womb needs the expanse to grow and to develop into the fetus and later into the baby that will be delivered into hand that would further nurture it into the adult. He was losing to these conversations that seemingly were louder than his imagination. He was hearing these criticisms that had been taken from other people and their pessimistic views. He had already lost the battle before he had even begun to fight it. The voices of those close to him were filling his head with doubt. The passion was being submerged in senses that he could not write or that if he could write he was filling the page with typos and other grammatical and spelling errors. This all compounded to enforce the delusion that he could not write and therefore his ability to actually write was being hindered.

I gave him a unique solution to fix this problem. First I had him sit back and clear his mind. From there he was to close his eyes and to only think about what he was writing; to let the passion grow and to only listen to the streams of thought that poured from his mind. He was to let go of the grammatical and spelling attempts and to simply let the words pour forth from his mind and onto the page where they would later dance in the minds of the reader. It is a simple approach and one that takes an almost meditative skill in order to accomplish. It is not easy, that I will grant, but it is definitely doable. With his eyes closed there is no doubt that there would be many problems with his writing in the scheme of grammar and spelling as well as missed keys and typos but that the thoughts would flow onto the page. All of the problems that would occur could be fixed with a little editing once he had written until the passionate flames that compelled him to write had finally flickered out and even still the ambers of those flames had cooled to leave nothing but the ashes of desires now forged onto the page. It was a sad moment indeed when he allowed those conversations to obstruct the beauty in his writing. His muse was silence by they disproportionate negativity that was being extruded from his friends and family. Again, a sad moment indeed.

My method addressed this problem in several ways. First off he was forced to only pay attention the words that came to his mind. Part of the technique, towards the beginning was to role his head every so often to ensure that his concentration was actually clear and based on only those words that poured from his imagination. A way of refocusing periodically onto his writing; that way his eyes could stay shut and would not have to open to refocus. I continuously use pour in this article, not for lack of another word, but because words must pour richly and vastly from the writer in order to fill the screen or the paper with words that will eventually enlighten, dance, play upon the page for the reader. The conversations of negativity and criticism was simply blocked by forcing the attention to what the was writing about and not looking at the typos, grammar and spelling errors and forcing his imagination to see the words as he believe them to be; perfect. Editing, as I mentioned, will clean up his earlier mistakes.

Now I ask you: When did perfection come into play during a freewriting process? Did we loose something? Is it easily obtained again? When did the fantasy of the mind become something to be criticized? When did we, as a society, decide that we would ever have the right to criticize something written? It this not a form of book burning? Only now we are doing it before the book has ever been written! There are a great many things that I do not care to read but that does not give me the right to criticize them, only to not read them. I have the ability to say that I didn’t like it…but we do more than that when we do not like a written work. We take it to a nasty personal level by calling the writing an idiot, stupid, unintelligent, or something even worse. We call them any manner of things and albeit they may actually be those things based on what they are writing about; but we tend to make that determination based on other aspects of their writing and not what was written. A prime example is that you do not know if a writer of a fantasy book is really a fascist unless they blatantly state this.

I have a form of writing that is somewhat alyrical. The language that I use is taunting and often filled with spontaneity. It is filled with language that engages the person and is often a bit of a higher-level read, but that is chiefly due to the way that I word my sentences and the selection of my words. Some would say that I am intelligent, other would say other things. The point is that I may not be intelligent, I may be a fraud…you cannot judge from the writing, not in the way that we often judge writing. It is a matter of writing. There is passion behind it that is seldom understood by Joe public and must be seen from the perspective of pure, unadulterated writing. Writing is a power that we cannot understand based on the given standards of grammar and spelling. It gives immortality to the words and often to the writer despite how public or popular their book is. There is a power in writing that cannot be achieved through any other form. It is a power that can be emulated and even added upon with audio or pictures but realize that the ideas, the power, first began in writing. Even movies have scripts, ideas formulated into writing before the movie ever began any production. That is the power that is unleashed in writing.

Writing achieves vision to the reader. It reports knowledge that the reader did not have before hand and empowers them to be something, somewhere. It empowers them to take a stance, to use their imagination. Too many times have I heard someone say that they do not like to read. How sad. They are losing power to their lack of creativity. Perhaps that is why we are becoming such a vulgar society with little imagination and even less creativity. We read, mostly that I can see, because we have to. Seldom do I see people reading anything at all. I see so much more time being allotted to TV watching and movie going. Perhaps this is another reason that writers are becoming such short stock. Or perhaps why we feel that we need to criticize other’s writing at all. Are all of the ideas taken up? Doubt it. There are so many takes on so many things that I doubt that anyone could ever write about everything and have every take on it.

So where did we lose something. Why did we allow ourselves to have lost it? Why? I ask this solemnly as I see that there are so many less writers in this day. Many more are public but even people around me rarely take time to write a journal…that is where inspiration and past experiences should be related to later generations! I have surrounded myself with people who love to write; people whose passion for writing matches or exceeds my own. Admittedly there are fewer and fewer of these people for me to surround myself with. Where did the passion and the ambition go? When did we lose it? Where has it gone? Will it ever come back? My young friend found it again last night and wrote something for me that brought a tear to my eye. Let us not lose such greatness to the ego of those who assume that they can do better, write better, and think more cognitively than ourselves. We lose the beautiful diversity that writing has to offer unto us. Take no criticism. I will say it again. I live to write, I write to live. I love to write, I write to love…

The hour grows late, the passage grows dark. Hurriedly I make my way back to the safety of my home deep within the corridors of life, reminded of…Passages.