Mining for Gold

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
Michel de Montaigne

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Over the past several months, I’ve been writing about how to loosen the pieces of a story that lives in your body. You start with remembering and then you return, record and retrace your steps. I think of these as the dig.  

But once you’ve retrieved the pieces, laying them out doesn’t automatically lead to a flow of thoughtfully expressed words. You need to decode what you have before you which asks you to reflect. You are mining for the literary gold in your experience.

And when you find that gold, it’s in the details that make your story pop. It’s the right word for a feeling. A facial expression or gesture that makes us understand a moment. A specific aroma in the air. A sound or lack of it. An insight. A question. It’s the details that allow you to find context, meaning and insight.

You may hesitate to hang out in reflection because you fear it, you worry about what you may find. But you can’t feel your experience if you don’t face it, and if we don’t feel it, it can live in our bodies creating chaos, havoc, ill health, serving no good purpose. 

So you have to be ready. You have to want to go there. But you don’t have to go there alone. When I was writing my memoir, I surrounded myself in the books that inspired me to write my own. Reach for a moving line from a song or quotes. Play a favorite piece of music on repeat. Schedule an extra appointment with your therapist.

When you see a part of your story reflected back to you in a new way, you begin the process of reframing the story for artistic, as well as healing, purposes.

I’ll be talking about that next month. So stop by.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish

Coming Up

“Honoring Heirlooms through Words: Writing to Discover & Declutter.” Ritualwell, Wednesdays, October 18-November 8, 11 am-12:30 (CT.)