The Writer/Self Steps Aside for the Work—Again

Lately I’ve been lost. Feeling anxious, fearful, an overwhelming sense of the uncertainty of life pulling me away from the center, as if I were spinning in some great centrifuge run amuck, the better parts of me flying off into space and the baser parts coagulating inside, gumming up the machine.

For years, as I writer, I have followed these words of the poet and novelist Edmond Jabès, “The writer steps aside for the work.” To write something beautiful and true one must put aside the ego and surrender to the world of the story. It’s not easy to do, but it’s what I strive toward as a writer.

This morning those words of Jabès came to me not as a writer as a seeker, one struggling to become truly human in this world and who has lost her way. “The writer steps aside for the work. “ To be present to the world, in but not of it, one must de-center the self. How can one see what’s really going beyond all the illusory doings if one is blinded by one’s own needs or concerns? How can one hear what the world is saying, singing, with every breath in and out, if one’s mind is chattering away about what dangers to look out for or what needs to be done? To know what needs to be done, realize what one can do in the moment, any moment, every moment, in order to be a messenger of hope or peace or grace or joy or justice to another, one needs to get out of the way, to return to an empty center of radical trust from which all things radiate in beauty, joy, and love.

Anxiety and insecurity constrict the heart, seal it up in itself, a hardened mass of scar tissue that shuts out the world.

Trust releases the heart so it can soften, open outwards toward the world, infinite in its beauty, in love.

The major turn in life announced by all mystics is that from fear to love; but the turning comes through trust.

How hard, though, to get out of one’s own way and release oneself into the surrender of trust. I may manage for a time, and then, as now, I lose that still center of trust that carries me beyond my little self to the larger world. It happens over and over again. When I lose that center I am tempted to berate myself. How can this happen, I wonder? Why can’t I hold on to the peace, the joy, the calm at every moment, in every season and situation? Am I not trying hard enough? Not advanced enough? Was I fooling myself about trusting so deeply? Often it doesn’t even take an external event to set that centrifuge in motion and get me spinning out of calm and focusing all the me-ness at the center to gum up the works and throw everything off. It just happens. Because with all my efforts I am not as constant as I would like to be.

Then I remind myself that whipping myself is part of that centrifuge run amuck. Begin again. And again. And again. There is no arriving. The Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan often quotes his father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, to remind seekers that there is no arriving. As we move forward, Khan says, the horizon recedes and seems to grow even larger. We never arrive. We are always on the way. Always setting out toward the horizon, that larger world beyond our little selves in which our selves find their true place, their true home, their true rest. Always beginning again.

So today, once again,I must give up that moaning and self-loathing of the little, constricted, hermetically sealed self and just get on the way. Today I must travel back toward that empty center of surrender, radical trust, and begin the journey toward the horizon again.