Why metaphor?
This past spring in our Sanctuary for the Soul workshop, someone expressed their desire to be a “better writer.”
My response to this very common wish is usually something along the deeply considered, oh-so compassionate lines of “shut up your face. You’re a beautiful writer.”
For once, I decided to give it a beat and not interrupt this lovely soul’s longing with my well-worn certainty.
Thank god, because the question then flowed to our co-facilitator Tim, who really listened to what the person was asking. This lovely soul—who indeed is a beautiful writer!—was seeking ways to move deeper into poetic ways of expressing themselves. They wanted to invoke the qualities of color and musicality they heard in others’ work, in the so-called “great” works. It felt juicy to them, not performative.
After allowing the space to fill fully with this person’s deep and sincere intention, after letting it swim around his own poet’s body for a few moments, Tim replied patiently, “Oh, you’re talking about metaphor.”
And with that, the center of our weekend’s exploration—and a huge part of what made it so transformational—was found. We played with metaphors in our writing, in our imaginations, in our prayers, in our lives.
Metaphor turns out to be a magical swiss army knife for the creative soul. And it is far more available to us than we realize.
Creation as resistance—or rather, as healing
More than that, metaphors are beautiful. It’s becoming clearer to me with every wise thing I read, every sage person I listen to, that what there is to do now, in the face of all this destruction, is to keep putting beauty in the world. We may not be able to stop the tidal wave of fear that is bent on consuming everything in its path. But we can start planting things in the soil that will sprout and repopulate the world once the fear recedes—or maybe even before that.
We can keep repairing the net of love. Keep darning it where the cords have frayed. We can assure the Earth we see her, we’re doing our best for her. We can assure each other that although we are all caught in this bizarre matrix—one that seems to be bringing itself down before our very eyes—that even so, we see each other.
Better More sincere
That, I think, is how we become “better” writers, better artists. Not by developing technical prowess, or holding ourselves to arbitrary rules. Maybe at some point that was a useful, even joyful, way of proliferating beauty in the world. I don’t think it’s so effective any more, if it ever was. I think beauty comes from going intrepidly inward, mining for what is true. Or voyaging far, far outward, reaching for (or remembering) what exists outside of our limited human experience.
Let beauty and truth emerge from invisible places. Let them ride on the images, the symbols, the stuff of this still-beautiful world. Let them ride on metaphor. Metaphor is everywhere. It’s the raw material offered up by life, reaching for us to put it together in endless new ways.
In Summer Camp this year we’re going to play with metaphors because metaphors are beautiful. They are the ready material we can gather in bunches, braid together in skeins, throw on the wheels of our imaginations, create something new to send out as a blessing, to bury in the ground to sprout new life.
