Dan Wakefield

 “Miracles seem to me to come not from faces or voices coming to us from far off, but from our senses being made finer, so our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about it always.”

                        - Willa Cather
 
This is my favorite definition of miracles, by one of my favorite American writers. Cather's definition of miracles is also a clue to finding a rich source of ideas for writing, and for making our writing stronger and more alive. The five senses are a kind of “Open Sesame” to unlock creativity, and to give greater depth to what we create.

I first put this concept into practice when I was in “spiritual direction” with a nun in Boston. I am not a Roman Catholic, but I was seeking to deepen my own faith, and I had heard that “spiritual direction” was a way to do that. I was delighted to find a nun who agreed to be my spiritual director, and I eagerly took my notebook to our first session, assuming she would give me some clandestine Roman formula that would give me a special link to God.

“Look at tree,” she said, and think about what God had in mind when he created it, what we can learn about God from meditating on it.”  

I was disappointed at such a simple assignment, but I dutifully went to The Boston Public Garden and sat down in front of the biggest tree I could find. I looked up at it and felt overwhelmed. The tree seemed too large and complicated to begin to comprehend. Instead, I picked out something to meditate on that seemed more suited to my powers of understanding: a blade of grass.

I meditated on the blade of grass for twenty minutes every day for two weeks, as the Sister had instructed, and I was amazed that I kept seeking something new all the time – different facets of color and texture, the way it moved in the wind, its relation to the grass around it – the aliveness of it. I wrote in m notebook the words that seemed to describe the qualities of God that were manifested in the grass: “tenacious, resilient, alive, communicating, dancing, dependent, surprising, reaching, responding.”
  
Go pick out something in nature -  a flower, a tree, a leaf, even a rock – and meditate on it for twenty minutes. Write in your journal what you see in it, the “qualities” it has – softness or hardness, light or dark and what color, what veins or striations or bumps in the bark; what does it smell like, feel like to the touch? What “qualities” does it have that you have, or that you wish you had? Does it remind you of anyone you know, or bring back a memory of something you once did, or some place you have been? Write down whatever comes to your mind as you “be with” this object in nature, and let your mind and imagination flow freely. Don't edit yourself or censor yourself. Let it flow.

Invite a journaling friend to do the exercise with you, and after you have both taken the time to meditate on the object in nature and written what you wrote about it, read to each other what you wrote.  Remember, everything in nature is another “prompt” for meditation, ideas, and writing.