By Brandy Renee McCann
Have you closely watched bees working summer flowers? In my backyard, tiny, fragrant goldenrod flowers unfold in clusters along arched stems, swaying and bending amongst tall burgundy-tinged mugwort and a rainbow of zinnias. Pollinators—little bees, big bees, and butterflies of all kinds—blossom hop amongst the golden florets, sometimes pausing to nap, before making their way to the explosion of daisy asters beyond. Those busy bees rest in early autumn air, both sweet and astringent, warmed by the dying sun.
This orchestra of beings in my wildflower garden has been my primary subject lately, as well as my primary audience. Other than this column and my academic writing, I have sent out only one creative piece in the last year. I almost never post to my Substack anymore. Truth be told, like so many others, I am struggling with finding the wherewithal to create. When I manage to find the time, I don’t want to write about the thing taking up my brain space—most of which is political-is-personal in nature. Writing about the daily onslaught of bad news feels futile, and greater minds than mine seem to say what I think before I even pick up my pen.
Nevertheless, all my life I have contemplated about how to live in right relationship in the world, about how to show up authentically. When I was young, I thought that meant “following my heart” and “being true to myself.” Also, I studied many sacred texts, with the Christian Bible being foundational. Yet as I grew older and more intentional about squaring up my inner authenticity and spiritual ethics, I felt a gap begin to form. I wondered if my “authenticity” was simply “anxiety,” as following my heart often felt more like following my appetites rather than aligning with the future self I wanted to become.
Lately, thanks to a book club, I’ve been circling back around to the Yogic ethical principles known as the yamas and niyamas. In many ways, they are similar to the old familiar Biblical ten commandments, which teach us not to lie, cheat, covet, steal, and so forth. In particular, I’ve been returning to yogic author Deborah Adele, who similarly wrestles with the gap between the life lived and future life desired. “I had taken no time [for] reflection or integration; it was just on to the next thing, full speed ahead,” she writes of a particularly busy era in her life. She argues that it is a failure to uphold asteya, or the principle of non-stealing, when we are so busy we do not learn from our experiences or even make lasting memories. When we hurry from one activity to another, we rob our minds and future selves of the opportunity to rest and integrate our experiences.
Similarly, in Black theologian Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, rest is not simply about napping or checking out: it is about deep listening while in a state of repose. Yet resting has become difficult for so many of us when scrolling social media in our down time, feeding our brains with one outrageous headline after another. But rest from information is increasingly critical. In yogic practice and herbalism, we talk about engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, which allows the body to rest and digest and make love—to go inward in stillness and silence so that we can integrate our experiences. Jill Jepso, in Writing as a Sacred Path, invokes the image of a caterpillar in a cocoon: “Solitude takes us away from the tumult of daily life and allows our inborn creativity—which is one with the great creative force of the Universe—to flow.” Too often our words and actions are driven by anxiety and fear, rather than emerging with wings—powerful and measured—from an authentic, integrated self.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron instructs writers and other creatives to take time each day to freewrite morning pages. Although these morning pages will mostly end up as compost, the main purpose in writing them is to learn to write through the busy-ness of our minds—to work through our fears and anxieties so that we can access a more restful, creative space afterward. Cameron’s personal-writing process has helped me to discover a sense of comfort in the gap I’ve discovered in myself, between doing what feels familiar and easy and what is authentic.
Reliving my trauma and recreating drama from my life over and over again on the page actually feels good to me. It lights me up and makes me feel as though I’m being true to myself when I write about these topics, and in a certain way I am. But what personal writing has taught me is that being authentic also means imagining the kind of person I want to be and to make harder choices that align with that vision. Often that means I simply walk outside with a notebook and pen and record what I see in as much detail as possible. Instead of focusing on writing about myself, I focus on writing about what is outward and around me.
Writing, even personal writing that will never be seen, creates a fragile paper bridge connecting my current self to the future self of my dreams, the self who is a being that can rest on the goldenrod, surrounded by many other winged things…
…The sky above is clear, deep autumnal blue. An imperceptible breeze catches the porch chimes, and they begin to hum in a low, soothing tone. She hears the motors of cars driving along a busy side street in the distance—so many all the sudden. Where have they got to go? What is so important she wonders? She writes that down in her notebook, under the description of the bees sleeping in the flowers. Then she puts down her pen.
The sweet whisperings of the goldenrod and the cacophony of the winged ones buzzing and calling and beeping and chirping in the dying sun command her attention: they focus her prayer.
And what is writing anyway, if not a prayer.
Read Brandy’s other work here at Reckon.
Brandy Renee McCann, PhD is a writer and social scientist whose work is focused on life in Appalachia. Her creative work has been published in Reckon Review, Still: The Journal, Change Seven, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Dead Mule, and other literary venues. Brandy’s scholarly, collaborative work on aging in Appalachia can be found in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the Journals for Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Rural Mental Health, and Journal of Family Issues among others. Brandy is a research associate and project coordinator at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech. To learn more about the family caregiving research in which she’s currently involved, visit here: https://careex.isce.vt.edu. Her social media handle is appalbrandy.