Writing a Long Poem During the Darkest Days

So already, the poem I've been writing for the last two months isn't finished yet. But the process of writing it has been so affirming and engaging that I wanted to write about it.*

It's been taking a willing, insightful village* to move the writing of this poem forward--and what could be more affirming than the thoughtful willingness of one's fellow villagers? How fortunate I am to have a writing group and poetry-reading friends from my college days who've read and commented on "November Dark" during these last weeks. Their sensibilities as readers and firsthand knowledge of me have helped the poem hone in on both my personal emotional truths and on some related more universal ones. I am so grateful to these reader-friends.

Still, this post is going to focus on my dark-day-in, dark-day-out relationship to the poem.

 

"November Dark" is a long--really, a long ass**--poem. Returning to it again and again during this season of late sunrises and early sunsets has been both comforting and challenging. And "November Dark" has insisted that I return to it again and again.

So why "long ass"? I know I'm not someone you'd generally expect to use that word, especially in writing. It's not just that the poem I'm writing is long--not as long as Paradise Lost, or even "Ash Wednesday," but long for me. And it's not just that it's taking me a long time to write it--not as long as it probably would have taken Elizabeth Bishop to craft what she would have considered a respectable first pass at a poem, but a long time for me.

 

More importantly, "November Dark" has had me stuck in its craw*** since early November--so "long ass" has more to do with the quality of the experience of writing a first respectable draft of it over a number of weeks.

 

Frankly, the poem has been completely inhabiting me--teasing me some days, daring me others, eluding and encouraging me in alternation, playing hide and seek with me--often acting more like a skittish potential lover** than a bunch of words on a page actually trying to become and say something. 

 

In other words, it's been plaguing me in the best possible way. It's been my companion, a soulmate**** who keeps me up at night with constant suggestions and considerations, with ideas for other words and alternative phrases. It's been fostering the kind of sleeplessness that inspires rather than troubles me--which is ironic because the poem is rooted in the experience of troubling routine sleeplessness. Once I finish this poem, I think I'll miss its knocking on the door of my consciousness at any hour, and my immediate flinging open of that door to welcome it. Realizing this makes me a little ambivalent about finishing it.

 

So why has writing this poem been a particularly engrossing, extended experience? Why have I felt so attached to it? No doubt because its subject is loss and grief that are fresh, alive, and mine right now. As many of you know, my mother died in early October, my father died at this time of year four years ago, and Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in early November's presidential election.

On December 5, when I was struggling to know how to combine certain ideas and blocks of content that I instinctively felt belonged together in the poem's third section, I wrote the following about the effect grief was having on my relationship with the world:

There's a sense that there's a veil or scrim interposed between me and the urgent, my blunted sense of the urgent, despite my recognition of it. And I was glad of that blunted sense. That's one of the interesting things about grief, I think: it both holds you and sustains you, even though it weighs on you and causes you pain. But really what it causes you is sadness because it's real and you know that you're wounded--and you're wounded in a healthy, understandable way. It's almost like it makes nothing else matter all that much. And you just try to go about your day as best you can without magnifying anything or dismissing anything. You don't make more of it and its effects; you don't make less of it and its effects.

As soon as I wrote this, I realized that though my long ass poem explicitly says I am mourning for my mother, it does not say that I am mourning for my father:

     Yes, I'm mourning for . . .  [my father and mother] both because I finally don't have to worry about her, but also because I always felt that my father was somehow alive in me because I was taking care of my mother, and that would have meant so much to him. So I carried him with me in this very active and  . . .  [embodied] way every time I went to see her. I still carry him with me, but not in the same way.

      The truth of the matter is that I now realize--well, it's not just now--that I'm really mourning for both my mother and father--her death took him away from me again, . . .  added another layer or level of separation to what was already a major separation. And how could I not be when so many of the pictures that I have of each of them are pictures of both of them?

In the same way I invisibly carried my father with me whenever I went to visit my mother in these last four years, my long ass poem, which makes no mention of him, invisibly carries him, too. Sometimes one poem can't tell the whole story, can't make explicit all the layers. And yet they're there. I think I'm writing this blog post to assert the presence of my father in the bones of my poem.

 

This year, Hanukkah comes exceedingly late: the first candle will not be lit until the Christmas Day night, and eighth candle will not be lit until New Year's Day night. I'll be lighting both my "Womenorah," as it was called by the Vermont artist who created it years ago, and the menorah that was always at the center of my family's Hanukkah observances throughout my childhood and teenage years. Now that both my mother and father are gone, I feel especially fortunate to have inherited what was their menorah.

 

On the second night of Hanukkah, I'll be lighting an additional candle--the one that marks my father's yahrzeit--the anniversary of his death on Jewish calendar. So there will be plenty of light in my dining room. And lots of memories.

It's been a long-ass year--I think everyone who's been at all caught up in this year's election fever feels this way, too. And yes, my long ass poem is close to being done. You will get to read it sometime in 2025 if that's your wish.

 

Until then, may you fully enjoy the various holidays you'll be celebrating as the solstice passes and we head again toward the light. May you and your loved ones enjoy celebrating with one another, and may your memories of those with whom you celebrated in years gone by be more sweet than sad. 

* "Cobbled steps meandering between quaint cottages in the North Yorkshire coastal village of Robin Hoods Bay. Pen & Ink - 8"x11"on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472623692089089&id=100080243860310&set=a.165923569425771

** The online world offers two spellings for this word, "long ass" and "longass." Autocorrect likes "long ass" better.

*** Screen shot of work of art on this website: https://dateagle.art/blog_post/clare-price/--a Clare Price blog post.

****"Like chrysalids unfold their wings and soar into the night"--a painting by Scott Ketcham that will be on view in January and February 2025 in the Horan Gallery at the Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA. https://ventresslibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/scott-ketcham-reception/

The Devil of Perfectionism

So already, when a word comes up in multiple places in a short period of time, I pay attention to it. Last week, I read the word "perfectionism" in three different places, all of which warned people away from it.

 

In my experience, perfectionists invariably want something good, and want to do something good. What separates them from others similarly motivated is their belief that doing everything right, that doing every little thing "excellently" and to the highest standards, is the best path toward their cherished aspirations. 

 

Being perfectionists, they're often both comforted and intimidated* by the word "best." They're often accustomed to doing things very, very well, and they fall back on the old habit of striving to meet high individual standards when they don't know what else to do in pursuit of their goals.

The irony is that according to what I read, pursuing perfection is precisely what gets in their way. Too much attention to doing things perfectly often blinds them to other possible if less "certain" ways of working toward their goals. Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves listening more to others, thinking more about  others (as opposed to the idea of others); writing really rough, really terrible rough drafts; or wondering at length what the neighborhood crows have been cawing about all morning.** Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves in less self-inflicted pain, even if there's other pain to be felt.

So what kinds of problems and challenges make us nervous and uncertain enough to fuel our perfectionist tendencies? pull us out of our comfort zones? proclaim to us that we're not fully in charge? make us feel stupid and small, even lost--and sometimes, dangerous and harmful?

I wasn't surprised that Julia Cameron talked about perfectionism as counterproductive in Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity:

In light of all of this, I am not sure where we got the idea that in order to be 'real' artists we had to do things perfectly. The minute we see the world 'perfect' . . . , spontaneity goes out the window. . . . . (78) ***

When the goal is creating art, regardless of the type of art, we absolutely need to play and to experiment--and need to appreciate that "Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly" (79). In fact, creating bad art is generally believed to be a prerequisite for making good art. And the good news is that bad art, generally kept out of sight and earshot of others, usually doesn't harm them.

 

The next place I saw a take-down of perfectionism was in Rabbi Daniel Klein's column on the Hebrew College website. In "Elul: Beginning the Journey Home," Klein encourages his Jewish readers to examine their customary approaches to "teshuvah (repentance/returning)," often understood exclusively as "the process of reflection on and assessment of our actions and direction in life, making amends for misdeeds, and striving to live better lives."**** Having recently read in "a contemporary Hasidic book on spiritual practice" that "proposes that the core of teshuvah is not the self-assessment elements that lead to behavioral changes," Klein reveals that he is focusing his teshuvah efforts this year on "living with and in response to the God we find within ourselves and, of course, everyone we encounter"--and encouraging us to consider doing the same.

 

Not that how to do that feels obvious to all Jews. But relegating self-assessment to a secondary position makes being Jewish less intimidating during the annual High Holiday season of God's "judgment."***** The good news, according to the book Klein read, is that “'The Holy Blessed One does not require perfection, rather that we strive to serve with all our might….'" When it comes to teshuvah, the combination of sincere, effortful striving and loving intent atones, brings us closer to God, even when it doesn't yield "results." 

And that's the purpose of teshuvah: "reconnection to our unconditionally loving Source."  The key word is "unconditionally"--not conditioned on our achieving certain behavioral standards--which is not to say that we shouldn't strive and that we won't feel "regret for and sadness about our misdeeds." But perfectionism misses the point.

It misses the point in schools, too, where education--students' learning itself, students' coming to trust in their capacities to learn--cannot transpire outside of the relationships among teachers and students, each of whom bring with them each day the realities of their "traditional" positions in schools and society. And it misses the point in schools in which primarily BIPOC****** (black, indigenous, and people color) student groups, historically systemically deprived of the same quality of education as their white peers, are taught by white teachers.

 

I mention this because the third place I saw a critique of perfectionism was in From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity, co-edited by Chris Emdin and sam seidel. Unlike so many educator critics who pick up their pens to call out the failures of school policies, political leaders, and other educators, the educators whose essays appear in this book put themselves under the interrogator's spotlight and share personal painful, discouraging educator moments. These moments led them to understand that their commitment to social justice and educational equality, especially as pursued by questing after mastery of their teaching craft--teaching perfection--could not make their whiteness a neutral reality for their students or themselves.

 

In the book's first essay*******, Maya Park discusses how, as a first-year teacher, she came to view "my imperfections as a teacher as inseparable from my racism," which led her to embrace perfectionism as "my tool against racism" (4). After a particularly disturbing and probably harmful interaction with a student, she concluded that "To pursue perfection was to dehumanize us both" (6). Needless to say, she needed to try something different; and she did.

 

In a later essay, Adam Seidel also explores the temptation to resort to perfectionism, even when it doesn't seem like the best response to a perceived problem, because what a better response might be seems vague and potentially self-incriminating. Seidel describes a moment in a summer staff meeting when, instead of trying to make sense of some disturbing data about the college graduation rates of their former students, the teacher group recommitted to their usual approach to preparing their students for success in college: "we are going to have to work harder to make sure our lessons are vigorously prepped and practiced, our school systems and expectations are tight, and we build a culture that celebrates academic achievement" (128).********* In a nutshell, they said to themselves, "Let's get even better at what we're always trying to do better rather than even think about doing something really different."

"The Man Who Swallowed a Bird" by Scott Ketcham

But Seidel recognizes the problem with this: "we
were working to turn passion into a pathology--one that builds on a foundational belief that 'better is good enough' or more specifically that 'better than is social justice,'" which he comes to understand "in the context of white supremacy" (129). In light of this realization, Seidel changes his behavior in his own classroom: "on my best days, I shifted my practices, hovering above my interactions with students, listening with a closer ear to my language an how power and whiteness were held between us" (129).

But he doesn't quite know how to lead his staff to the same realization and to co-created shifts in practice that might lead to "true" educational quality and social justice. Toward the end of the essay, he explains, "I wasn't confident enough to try and be wrong. The stakes feel obvious now, and I'd like to think I would do things differently if I could go back, but whiteness and power and perfectionism were holding me back" (130).

Adam is my former student (as is his brother sam), and it pains me to read about his "shame and fear" (130). But I so admire his courage in "going public" with his story of coming up short and regretting it in retrospect. And I also know that his sharing of his story, along with his analysis of what was operating inside of and around him, and his feelings about it then and now, is an act of leadership that encourages the rest of us to be brave enough to stumble into this difficult problem space with others and be as genuine and unguarded as we can be. Again, perfectionism is not the answer, and when it becomes the comfortable fallback when we don't know what else to do, it uses up the valuable time and energy that could be devoted to a critical problem.

One of the biggest problems with perfectionism is that it's too often accompanied not just by disappointment, but by crushing self-loathing.********* There's work to be done--whether it's the work of making art, doing teshuvah, or doing right by one's students. Self-critique must necessarily be part of that work at some point. But this is where Julia Cameron again comes to the rescue, often reminding her readers to "Be gentle with yourself while you grow accustomed to your new mental and emotional terrain" (Cameron, 141). In my experience, the devil retreats when the pressure to be perfect dwindles, then disappears. After that happens, the real work can be done, even if it takes a while, is often discouraging, and almost always refuses to conform to a linear path.

 

* Illustrations and quotations about perfectionism accompanying the following: MacNaughton, W. (2024, April 14.) On perfectionism. DrawTogether with WendyMac. https://club.drawtogether.studio/p/on-perfectionism-69a

** Photo included within the following blog: Petrak, C. (2014, March 4). A murder of crows. Tails of birding . . . and things with wings. http://tailsofbirding.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-murder-of-crows.html

*** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

**** Klein, D. (2024, September 1). Elul: Beginning the journey home. Hebrew College. https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/elul-beginning-the-journey-home/

***** Original drawing accompanying Green, E.C. (2021, March 5). The triumph of teshuva. Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-triumph-of-teshuva/

*(6) Screenshot of photograph included in the following: Chatterji, R., Campbell, N., & Quirk, A. (2021). Closing advanced coursework equity gaps for all students. Cap20: The center for American progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/closing-advanced-coursework-equity-gaps-students/

*(7) Park, M. (2024). Can we water ourselves and our students at the same time? In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 3-11). Beacon Press. 

*(8) Seidel, A. (2024). Much like all of the last. In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 125-130). Beacon Press. 

*(9) Photo accompanying the following: Sheryl. (n.d.) Say goodbye to perfectionism, and unleash your creative genius. thecreativelife. https://thecreativelife.net/goodbye-to-perfectionism/

Whose Soul Can Magnify the Lord?

So already, it's hot out there. In light of this, you may be wanting to set aside more active, physically demanding pursuits for the cerebral, sedentary one of reading.

Light Streaming Through Vessels, Magnified Perhaps

Vessel Talk

If that's your decision, and this blog is your choice of reading matter, be forewarned that it meanders even more than my usual wandering posts, ranging from ancient biblical sources to the Bach Magnificat to my kitchen renovation. So you may want to pour a cold beverage into your favorite drinking vessel before settling into your preferred reading spot and putting your feet up on the nearest coffee table or porch rail. Before you do even that, though, please note the array of multi-colored glass vessels through which light gleams in the adjacent photo*--and be forewarned: I am deliberately using the word "vessel" at the start of this paragraph.

 

Ah, vessels! Among the various kinds, there are sea-going ones; blood-carrying ones; shattered ones once filled with Divine light, according to Jewish mystical tradition; and human ones, courtesy of the figurative language employed in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.  

 

Summer 2024

But wait: let's turn aside briefly from these ancient vessels for a moment for a quick look at the here-and-now. It's been a politically unsettling summer for many of us. And a personally unsettling one for my husband Scott and me since our kitchen is being renovated. Most of our drinking vessels are currently packed in cardboard boxes stashed in our bedroom and closets; other boxes have briefly filled other spaces. Not surprisingly, the project has pretty much swallowed our physical space and disrupted our living patterns.

 

Even before we began this project, I understood that disruption is a prerequisite for major change of any kind. What I hadn't fully understood, though, was that disruption actually creates unforeseen seize-able opportunities when it re-configures time and space.

 

Knowing the first two months of summer would be marked by disruptions of time and place, I decided to use the weirdly placed parcels of time I would have to rediscover, rescue, and jump-start my stalled creativity. The excuses I had all spring for not tackling the questions of "what should I write" and "should I be writing at all" were gone: the Celtics championship season was over, my singing lesson "school year" had concluded, my poetry group had just begun its "summer off," and my periodic deep-cleaning impulses were a complete mismatch with the reality of the renovation moment.

Back to Julia Cameron

As I anticipated having to spend time in my office-kitchen while the power saw wailed and the electric screwdriver revved and punched in the other room, I thought back to the satisfying experience of completing Julia Cameron's twelve-week The Artist's Way course during the summer of 2015. It had provided just enough gentle structure and worthwhile provocation to help me get out of my own creative way.

 

With that in mind, I purchased Cameron's Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity. "Further Steps Along the Artist's Way" the banner at the top of its cover proclaimed, reassuring me that I wasn't the only one who needed a Cameron refresher. I loved that the book's subtitle described creativity as an art, as opposed to describing the book as a practical guide to creativity.

My plan was to start the Walking in This World course right after participating in a vocal recital along with the other students of my voice teacher, Karin Foley. In retrospect, I realize how useful it was to do something artistic, collective, and demanding right before embarking on the next Cameron challenge. For all of us, "serious" solo singing is a stretch that permits us to experience ourselves in new musical ways, creating in each of us a different sense of performance possibility. And we're excellent cheerleaders for one another!

Preparing to Walk in This World

During the week before the recital, I took the time to reread and think about the four poems I'd managed to get published in the past year. When I realized that the two of which I was proudest drew from Jewish sources, I immediately committed to one action step to stimulate my creativity: reading cover-to-cover Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life in Judaism by Sarah Hurwitz, a former chief speechwriter for Michelle Obama.

 

When I'd delved into the book before, I'd marveled at the similarity between Hurwitz's Hebrew School experiences and my own, and at Hurwitz's ability to summarize and distill complex narratives and arguments while making sure that her readers never forget that another Jewish writer might highlight different Jewish ideas as particularly central and transformative.

So the last week of June, serenaded by the sounds of the lower kitchen cabinets' being power-screwed into place, I began reading Hurwitz's book from the very beginning. In the first chapter--in which Hurwitz summarizes Judaism's most sacred text, the Torah (or the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses), in just six pages--I came across an important Jewish idea that, like Hurwitz, I hadn't known originated in the Torah, specifically in Genesis 1:27, in which God creates humans in His own divine image.

 

Made in God's Image

To share it with you, I will quote from Hurwitz, who herself quotes from Rabbi Yitz Greenberg:

The belief that every single one of us is created in the image of God has been cited as the defining Jewish idea, the beating heart of the entire Jewish enterprise. And you don't have to believe in any kind of deity or higher power to appreciate its implications. Drawing on an ancient Jewish teaching, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg argues that this idea is shorthand for three fundamental truths, which he deems the 'three in-alienable dignities':

1. We are each of infinite worth--no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.
2. We are fundamentally equal--no human being  is any more important than any other human being.
3. We are each totally unique--there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anyone else. (15-16) **

The first two of the dignities I totally appreciated as rooted in the Creation story. But that third one surprised me. Had it arisen from the language of "His image" and "male and female He created them," I wondered. God's image--the one God's image, His image--was inherently differentiated, made up of two different kinds at least, and by extension many others. 

 

Sparks of Divinity and Individual Difference

And all those different kinds of people so made, according to mystical Judaism, contain sparks of Divinity. Practically speaking, it made sense: if you're going to renovate a kitchen, let alone repair a world, you need people who can do different things: contractors, cabinet-makers, plumbers, appliance-haulers, electricians, inspectors, to name a few. You also need people who want to renovate a kitchen or repair the world. Who want to do a good job of it.

 

David Brook Illustration Accompanying Chabad Reply

As a Jew who believes that everyone contains a spark of the Divine, I had struggled for years to understand the relationship of my individuality to that spark of God within me. How much, I wondered, could and should I cultivate my individuality, my difference from others, which, for reasons that elude me, I believed existed in opposition to this "equal" spark? Eventually I resolved my conflict, in part because I recognized that Stepford Jews was neither the reality I saw nor the goal of the "Jewish enterprise," as Hurwitz called it. 

 

But I might have resolved it sooner had I come across Tzvi Freeman's reply to a question on the Chabad website: "Why do you assume that the divine spark expresses itself identically in all people? Perhaps the opposite is true: It is that divine spark that makes each of us unique and gives us purpose."***

 

"Different" is therefore natural--and intended for the good of a world in need of repair, or tikkun olam. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, "Each person contains sparks that they must elevate. The sparks wait for him to come and elevate them."**** Based on these two teachings, divine sparks give rise to different people, who are bidden, no doubt in their different ways, to lift up those sparks, for world's sake.

Chosen Ones: Moses and Mary

Of course, to read the Torah or anything about it is to encounter Moses, and his sister Miriam and brother Aaron, each of whom was made in God's image, made different from the other two, made important, and made equal to the other two. When Moses--who, like Joe Biden, stuttered--recommended that his brother Aaron lead the Israelites instead of himself, God wasn't having it. That got me thinking about Moses' uniqueness and the whole question of who among all of us equal and important ones is most suited to do a particular job or play a particular role. 

 

And that got me thinking about Mary, Jesus's mother--not surprisingly, given that I had taught "The Bible as Literature" for years and had sung, as choral singer, all kinds of music related to the Annunciation and the Crucifixion. Mary's an amazing figure and character: as a young woman, she takes it relatively in stride when the angel Gabriel informs her that she's the "highly favored one" who will bear God's child, accepting his extraordinary news only after questioning him. 

 

The Magnificat

When not much later Elizabeth recognizes Mary's situation, Mary expresses her joy and understanding, and also reveals her considerable skill as a poet, in her praise poem often called The Magnificat. In it, she employs the multiple kinds of poetic parallelism found typically in the Psalms and other writings in the Jewish Bible. She also borrows themes and motifs from the books of Isaiah and Amos to suggest the urgent need for social transformations that will end oppression and inequality. In other words, Mary, a Jewish girl, expresses herself very Jewishly.

 

She also speaks more personally, acknowledging that she's at once the lowly handmaiden--no more important than you and me--and the favored one chosen to bear and then raise God's child, and then rejoicing in that honor. In this context, courtesy of her good character, faithfulness and spiritual depth, Mary is a vessel "for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work" (2 Timothy 2:21). "A virgin unspotted," as she is called in William Billings' "Judea," she, unlike many other candidates for "vesseldom," hasn't needed to undergo a spiritual cleansing in order to merit the role and honor conferred on her.

 

So what does it mean that her soul "magnifies" the Lord--and please know that not every translator of the Greek in which The Magnificat was recorded chose "magnifies" as the translation of whatever word Mary would have spoken in Aramaic. Still, since connotations matter, "magnifies" is worth paying attention to. 

 

Magnifying God: How and Who?

Can God--who is often conceived as vast and limitless--become larger through the actions of a human soul? Maybe. If so, the lesson to be learned is that people are really powerful.

 

Or is Mary's choice of verb more figurative: is it intended to reflect how deeply and intensely she appreciates and feels compelled to convey God's boundless reach and eternal commitment to his Creation? When I think of the intent of "magnify" in this way, it suddenly makes sense to me why J.S. Bach's setting of The Magnificat, replete with its trumpet fanfares, its many movements of varying moods and levels of intimacy, and its momentous, multi-voiced Gloria, can succeed at representing a humble young woman's personal and nuanced outpouring of gratitude, thought, and feeling.

So does this mean that anyone's soul can magnify the Lord? Well, potentially, yes. But there would have to be caveats. No doubt magnification would require a forceful, confident, enlightened spiritual effort. I could be very wrong about that, though.

 

A magnified section of a Scott Ketcham painting

There's also a related question: would every soul want to magnify the Lord? I can imagine every soul's wanting to magnify something--to assert, announce, or push something meaningful, valuable, and expressive of itself out into the world. But the connection between this intent and God might be far less explicit and central in the world views of some individuals. And for some, it might not exist at all.

 

Magnification and Walking in This World

So with those two questions hanging out in the air, let me digress even further to explain what got me thinking about the word "magnify" last week. In the second session of the Walking in This World course, entitled "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," Cameron talks about the challenge of--and the frequent necessity of--imagining ourselves as "larger" than we're accustomed to. 

 

What holds us back from seeing a magnified and magnifying version of ourselves? Explains Cameron, "Frightened of being big-headed and egotistical, we seldom ask 'Am I being too limited, too small for who I really am?' Expansion can be frightening."***** (41-2). And when we do feel ready to spread our wings and be public about our expanding wingspan, some friends may continue to see us as smaller for any number of reasons, which doesn't help us. "The tricky part about changing sizes creatively is that we want to keep our old friends but not our old identity," says Cameron (43). 

 

"Hidden Anger #1" by Bob Hunt *(6)

As we begin to change, we can become angry at ourselves and at others. But as Cameron explains in third week of the course, "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," "Anger is a call to action. It is challenging and important to let our light shine. It is important to name ourselves [acknowledge our creative selves] rather than wait for someone else to do it, or pretend that we can bear it when we can't." (67).

Light, Hidden Light, and Names

Light, hidden light, and names: all very Jewish stuff. If you'll bear with me further, I'll say more about each, and then try to make all of them relate to this question of whose soul can magnify.

1. First, Cameron concurs with the Jewish mystical belief that all of us, equally important and unique, contain sparks of Divine light, and she would probably concur that we're bidden to lift them out of their hiding places and manifest them in the world. Cameron also recognizes that for various ones of us, our interior light has become so well hidden for completely understandable reasons that it requires special techniques to be liberated. Our interior light can need help to expose itself to the light of the exterior world.
   
2. Second, in Jewish mystical teaching, "a name is an intermediary between heaven and earth . . . which defines and shapes the light."*(7) So when, as Cameron says, we name ourselves by calling ourselves artists, we channel our interior Divine light so it can manifest itself in the world in a/the way most expressive of our authentic selves and souls. For those for whom making art is akin to being expressive of God--as it is for Cameron--this idea and Cameron's embrace of it may particularly resonate.
   
3. Third, as I learned today in my pursuit of better understanding magnification, telescopes need light in order to make visible distant objects, which often appear dim as well as small. Telescopes both "Gather light (make things appear brighter than they do with the naked eye)" and "Magnify the image (make things appear larger than they do with the naked eye)."*(8) Light, perhaps, might help us perceive light, even light hidden in the remote recesses of our selves.
   

So what does all of this signify? In my estimation, magnification is essentially a ratcheting up of praise to its highest level--praise on steroids. So the question of whose soul can magnify the Lord--or the artistic impulse, or anything else--has everything to do with the effort, insight and understanding, and intention behind it. Names and praise can exist simply as words in our mouths. Or, fueled by the light within us, they can be drivers and bullhorns respectively, forces that, after registering their presence in the world, influence it, or even transform it.

Liberating the LIght Within

Of course, there's plenty that can bury, obscure, or downright snuff out light. Biblical books of prophecy talk about the refiner's fire that burns away the impurities, the clogging dross that taints our souls and thus dims our inner light. The annual Jewish rite of teshuvah, undertaken before and during the Jewish High Holy days, is essentially a process of removing all that worldly build-up that stands between God and ourselves collectively and individually. Though Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak did not use the word "vessel," he may as well have when he compared the work of teshuvah--deliberate, reflective, and focused-- "to cleaning, repairing and rebuilding a soiled or broken container" (Jacobson, 17).

Similarly, the literature written to guide, inspire, and reassure blocked creatives, emerging artists, or artists in recovery emphasizes the necessity of removing or blocking impediments to our creativity, and cultivating methods for doing so. Like The Artist's Way, Walking in this World prescribes the daily routine of writing "morning pages"--three pages of anything designed primarily as "the daily broom that clears my consciousness and readies it for the day's inflow of fresh thought" (8). Only just now as I was searching for this quotation did I realize that the book's cover drawing depicts a man sweeping next to a vigorously flowing stream.

 

In addition, morning pages can give rise to writing ideas. They served up the idea for this blog post, and when they did, heeding a question and answer in and the Week #1 session--"Do I want to make this? If that answer is yes, then begin" (19)--I got writing. No second-guessing, no putting off. And if you're still reading, please understand that as a way of clearing away all of my usual "'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'"*(10) self-sabotaging, dross-producing techniques, I determined to write everything I wanted to say, even if this blog got far too long, far too geeky and rarefied, and so wide-ranging in its content that its center would not hold. Thank you, T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats!

And all this because of a kitchen renovation project that created limitations and possibilities, plus a desire to get back on track creatively? You never know what's going to give you the opportunity to get busy cleansing your vessel. If you've read to this point, thank you for your indulgence: I've enjoyed feeling entitled to write lengthily about topics and questions that intrigue me. This blog and I myself have not magnified the Lord today. But I am feeling larger and braver, and that was my goal. A good feeling and a good goal.

* Photograph on Pinterest, chosen by me because I see the light as streaming through vessels, perhaps magnified: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f6/5a/34/f65a34bbcd7f0116388506c5358e0c87.jpg

** Hurwitz, S. (2019). Here all along: Finding meaning, spirituality, and a deeper connection to life--in Judaism (after finally choosing to look there). Spiegel & Grau. 

*** Freeman, T. (n.d.). Individuality and the Divine Spark. Chabad. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/676238/jewish/Individuality-and-the-Divine-Spark.htm

*** Photograph found on prettyblog.com: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/e8/ef/87e8ef5460f999887cf60892be47ff9d.jpg

**** Sparks (Nitzotzot). (2024). SPARKS (Nitzotzot). Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.nitsotsot.com/t-en-us/

***** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

*(6) Painting: Hunt, B. (2022) Hidden Anger #1. Artspur. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.artsper.com/ae/contemporary-artworks/painting/1875171/hidden-anger-1*

*(7) Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 days: A spiritual guide to the high holidays. New York: Kiyum Press.  

*(8) Magnification. (2024). Stellarvue. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.stellarvue.com/magnification/ 

 *(9) from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

*(10) Photograph of image fround on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/516154807269545929/