Outside Time

Over the past two months, I have written my current thoughts on alchemy into something that behaves like the start of a whole book. It seems each time I start to write something short, it tends to become not just more than I expected to write—but more like a co-authorship with the spirit of alchemy chiming in from inside the paper or the laptop. I’m used to this. Still, I never expect it to open. If I did, it probably wouldn’t join me. It’s like an AI—only, without the A.

My Creative Writing students have noticed (fortunately at intervals spaced in time so word doesn’t spread) that I recall specific writings they have done that fit with a piece they are currently developing.

“You’ve already developed it,” I say, “three or four semesters ago.” Then I share the document, which is very unlikely something I could do on purpose.

Recently a student told me about a part of the thesis where the words just stopped. A year ago, the student had approached the topic. I had written a letter to the student with advice on what I call “revising from within.” At the time I provided that feedback, the student recently told me, their computer didn’t show my comments. The student intuitively went back to that document using a new computer. My comments appeared, and, the student said, “they were exactly what I needed now.”

Another student way back in the program met. with me to discuss their creative thesis draft. It was a memoir. The student told me they couldn’t think what should come next. I remember they had written a personal essay that resonated. I thought it might show us where to look for next stages. I pulled it up on my computer. The date showed the same day of the year, and the essay provided the whole next part of the project.

My students come to expect strange events after their first semester. One student shouted out, “That’s terrifying,” during a writing session when we all just happened to share a detail in our personal writings. I respond with, “There’s a lot I don’t put in the marketing materials.”

Today, I terrified myself.

In preparation of offering some workshops and classes connecting soul and psychotherapy, I wrote the aforementioned part of a book. It connects my dots: Narrative Medicine, Alchemy, Poetry, Mythology, with a little memoir thrown in so it is readable. My mom told me it’s a bit dense. This means I will go back into the draft and relax the language. I get very intense when I talk about this work. I’m even intense as I write this. This current manuscript provided a map for yet-to-be-written parts. The problem is that when I sat down to develop one of the parts, I just didn’t feel intense—which means, in the language of my people, I don’t want to. From this state of insolence, I got the inkling to see if my earlier writings had a place.

Within a few password failures and secret codes (Does anyone else see how Medieval we have become?) I was crossing the drawbridge into my Castle Dropbox and seeing the rest of the book already written across three other manuscripts. They filled in the map more than adequately, even with another book to spare. I am so surprised by how the me that wrote those texts was banging out these passages. They’re elegant. They’re coherent and correct in ways I did not have the Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing data and insight I do now. I had not read books by Pema Chodron or Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, books that provide a nature of consciousness.

I consider that time in my life my third journey into the material. The first had been when I fell through a bridge into a glacial river in Switzerland and was saved by some presence under the water that otherwise would not let me swim to the surface. The second was when I moved into a small cabin at the foot of the Olympic Rainforest on Sequim Bay where Nature welcomed me into its mind with lessons given in the form of sweet show-n-tell, like “Hey, watch this.” The fourth was the brain injury of November 2, 2022 that chased me into darkness where I remained in excruciating pain for seven months, a pain that can return suddenly still. The third, the period of extreme prolificness, involved clawing my way back into life following deep psychological and physical trauma, #metoo.

I did not know about alchemy at the time. Even though I had venture deeply into a living and fully participatory Nature out West, I had returned my life to its ground. I didn’t talk or write about the events in Sequim until quite recently. It was this wild time that I loved and had left. When I was utterly broken, I wondered if maybe the darkness I was in then was connected to the darkness of my Olympic sojourn. As soon as I remembered the role that my imagination played in connecting me to Nature our there, I applied it to the current injury, and Nature, once more, accumulated a plan to get me out of psychic jail free.

The word “alchemy” entered my life during that process. What began as a single sentence highlighted on a xerox copy of a page from Jung’s Alchemical Writings grew into a year of reading the world’s sacred texts and unknowingly writing my own. These are the documents I found today, which I now see were my own binding of my life, in words, to the far greater consciousness. I wasn’t permitted to see that far at the time, and I can see how my having written the words did not automatically mean I understood the words. All I could know was that something was bringing me back to life. If writing almost perpetually accelerated or created the opportunity to feel human again, I would write forever.

The period ended with a book of poems written to the earth, called The Soul Tree. The book became the key that would unlock the door to a new world. Before it was even published, it won an award, a few lines from it appeared on a wayfinding sign in downtown Asheville, and the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation declared me its poet laureate with a ceremony with the National Park Service in attendance. The publishing house, Grateful Steps, hired me shortly after I left my teaching job, and from that position, Lenoir-Rhyne University found me and for which I have taught Creative Writing now for over a decade. That, my friend, is the way of alchemy. We don’t have to know or use the word, but I do. I feel it loves to me noticed and appreciated. I am noticing and appreciation every second.

In addition to the book of poems, I received a kind of instruction to launch Asheville Wordfest to set a model for multicultural microphones at poetry festivals. The festival ran for nearly 15 years, ending with the pandemic. The festival was the thing the other applicants from my job lacked. From deep inside my shattered psyche, poetry, alchemy’s ancient tongue, shone a light I have followed every moment. When I saw “narrative medicine” as an actual word shortly after starting at Lenoir-Rhyne, I knew I would attach to it and follow where it was going. Of course, it has led to alchemy and filled the shadows of the “occult” and “esoteric” with scientific light. The Age of Reason father’s said that science would perceive and know God, and it has, only they aren’t calling it God, or even Nature. They call it Medicine, which God and Nature don’t mind because that’s what they are, too.

I wrote The Soul Tree poems in under a week. I dropped my daughter at my mom’s and said, “The thing I have been preparing for is happening.” Being friends with Nature involves noticing—noticing an invitation to receive, an invitation to delight, an invitation to work my ass off on something just to show I’m still game, still obedient, even. That’s a big part of it. Total subservience is what I offered God and Nature way back when at 17, I lost the key to my father’s new Audi 5000 on Siesta Key Beach in exchange for finding it. The instant my hand touched a very particular piece of metal when I collapsed on the sad, I knew I was in for a ride. And I still am.

I can look back at my entire life and see all the times it was poking through the surface and structure of the apparent world. Miniscule details, barely perceptible encouragements, striking gestures of protection and salvation (Hello, glacial river in Switzerland). It is also a helper in the style of birds doing Cinderella’s hair and the Shoemaker’s elves. I remember writing one of my last-minute research papers in high school. I was writing about conscience in Crime and Punishment, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thérése Raquin.

I noticed that something was helping me locate quotes. I held the three books in my lap while I typed (no computers so no mistakes), desperate to finish before dawn. The books opened themselves to what I needed. I felt as though they lived inside me and that they were writing the paper. It has continued to show up the most when I am writing, such as this beautiful surprise today. Today it finished a book by writing it in two timeframes—and backwards and upside-down. Which is how the circular time of the soul and imagination works—and how I know it’s real.