On Coffee and Caves

She had me with the opening paragraph. Coffee and caves? This was a chapter to which I must pay attention.

“I am writing in a tony espresso shop on Park Avenue. Outside, it’s a sunny, hot June day. The avenue is noisy and full of rush-hour irritation. The espresso shop is a cool, dark cave.” (Julia Cameron, The Right to Write, p. 172, emphasis added)

When I take my coffee and and pick up my pen, I often make reference to the cave in which I think I’d be best suited to live.

Me, these days, I’ve been writing not on a crazy city street, but in the quiet of the hills, bound in by pines, enclosed in rocky outcroppings. Aside of the playful squeals of young nieces and nephew and the merry banter and raucous laughter of family together, this quiet is rarely interrupted.

While Dad made pancakes and hungry waking family shuffled in by ones and twos to eat before we went off to find bears and reptiles and defy gravity walking on walls and be dwarfed in the shadow of presidential stone carvings, I slipped back out into the quiet of the deck with my plate, my coffee, and a glass of juice in a Spongebob cup, to do thing I must do. To meet the One  I love to meet.

I heard Psalm 84 tell me something brand new for the seventh day in a row.

And then I turned back to the notebook, finding a place of peace and silence in the page and coffee on the table.

Even here in the open, in the light, in the fresh, surrounded by loved ones, I find solitude with my coffee in a self-formed cave.

Julia Cameron goes on:

Just as the espresso shop is a retreat from the city . . . the page is a cool cave of consciousness, somewhere to both meditate on life and savor it. (p. 172)

I wrap myself in the pages, thinking to hide out, to insulate an easily agitated spirit from stimulation, to take my lazy introversion on a daily retreat away from life-draining noise.

And I’m tempted, often, to stay there. To stay with me-and-only-me in the safety and ease of the cool, shadowed place.

Truthfully, sometimes guilt over that sends me back into the open.

But I’m finding, more often, that it’s the time in the cave itself (even better with coffee) that sends me back out.

Cameron, curiously, makes sense of that for me.

While our mythology tells us that writing is about the ivory tower, writing itself teaches an interest in life outside the tower. The artist is not a prisoner of art locked in the prison of the self. No! Art sets the artist free. Art is the key to freedom. Art is the doorway to a larger, livelier, and more involved self. I have said, “an involved self” and not “self-involved.” The consistent practice of art is a bridge between self and the world. (p. 173)

I do react just a little to the use of the word art. For Cameron, clearly, and for so many others, it’s exactly the right word. For me, not so much. I just don’t see it in terms like that.

But if I change the word out for something that suits me better, say just writing, then I can read this paragraph and know that I am growing into this. That the more I write, and the more consistently and intentionally, the less it makes me want to crawl into my cave to stay and the more it makes me want to stop in the cave but then get back out and see and feel and give and share and experience.

The page becomes less a shelter than a passageway.

I pay attention more, engage more.

Not because I want to write it (well, okay, sometimes).

But simply because I want to be a part of it.

::

It’s been a little while, but the discussion has continued on Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write over at High Calling Blogs. Check out Laura’s new post this morning, Wanted: Friendly Reader and other posts in the discussion below. For more, see previous posts in the series.

Marilyn’s Sweeping
Nancy’s Savoring Life
L.L.’s Julia Found Words for Me
Glynn’s The Practice of Writing
Cassandra’s Like Water on a Stone

Photo: Breakfast with the King (and Patrick)
on the vacation deck near Deadwood, SD