photo wcw 2021
JUST BEYOND THE MOMENT
“That other dimension where the words are waiting just beyond the moment you are witnessing”
WestCoastWoman 2020
I was sorting through bits and pieces of writing collected over the years and came upon a comment sent to another writer. I expressed how their writing took me to that “other dimension” the moment “just beyond” the witnessing. They suggested I try to form words around the dimension I was describing…..it felt ineffable.
In this same stack of papers I found a portion of an interview with Derek Walcott from the Paris Review, Winter 1986 I had copied from https://theuncarvedblog.com/2014/06/22/love-after-love-by-derek-walcott-resonates-deeply-when-you-first-acknowledge-yourself/ It comes as close to describing that ‘other dimension’ that I’ve ever read :
” But I do know that if one thinks a poem is coming on-in spite of the noise of the typewriter or the traffic outside the window, or whatever…..you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you…I am not a monk, but if something does happen I say thanks because I feel that it is really a piece of luck, a kind of fleeting grace that has happened to one. Between the beginning and the ending and the actual composition that goes on, there is a kind of trance that you hope to enter where every aspect of your intellect is functioning simultaneously for the progress of the composition. But there is no way you can induce that trance.”
Derek Walcott
MONKS WITHOUT MONASTERIES
Monks without Monasteries
Withdraw to Silence
Sanctuary
Gestating
Words Born of
Fleeting Grace
Trance
Kneel
Hands cupped
Offer
Thanks.
wcw 2023
Wildly and Dangerously Free 