The deepest life force

on creative energy and sharing the joy

Hello and welcome friends, familiar and new. I’m Jan and I live in a house that we are renovating in a forest. I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. Let’s create a little alchemy together. You are so welcome here. My Sunday posts are always free and you may find it easier to read online as some email clients have a length limit.

orchid bouquet, girl-with-red-hat, Unsplash

Writing, Ursula  Le Guin noted in her daybook, is a process of falling in love. For one of my poetry collections I fell in love with a ruined slate mine, with its history, culture, heyday, brutality and demise... In writing a recent novel I fell in love with a scrap of ancient forest. 

Currently I'm falling in love all over again with the story that brought me to this place. Over the years I've fallen in love with the structure of Don Quixote, a village in Snowdonia, Hungarian history and the poetry of Attila József, a 10th century Moorish princess who became a saint and healer, a maze of yew and hawthorn around a hazel tree in Roscommon, wild strawberries in the Philippines, the micro-seasons of my garden....

Within the novel, if on a winter night a traveler, Italo Calvino has a series of sensuous passages that compare both writing and reading to making love, and concludes,

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

As for making love and reading, so for writing — it opens spaces and times that defy the linear ticks of a clock. Creativity of all sorts takes us to different brain waves, altered senses of flow, sometimes (in the most precious of eternal moments) into the trance from which phrases seem to emerge from a depth we had no idea existed.

The analogy to lovemaking does not make reading or creative work only a personal and private activity that has no effect on the world. Story, in all its genres and all its art forms, from fiction to sculpture, poetry to textile art, is the stuff of life and changes the world.

Adrienne Rich knew this writing in What is found there: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. Writing about the interaction of poetry and politics that can be both intimate and fraught:

I want a kind of poetry that doesn’t bother either to praise or curse at parties or leaders, even systems, but that reveals how we are —  inwardly as well as outwardly — under conditions of great imbalance and abuse of material power. How are our private negotiations and sensibilities swayed and bruised, how do we make love — in the most intimate and in the largest sense — how (in every sense) do we feel? How do we try to make sense?

How do you want to feel? is the fundamental question I ask working with anyone seeking support from herbs.

What story do you want to write? What story do you want to become? are the foundation stones of my work with creatives and writers.

Sense making is what story does, what any journey to wellness, or journey towards death, seeks. And this is incredibly intimate, tender, sensual work.

Rich goes on to talk about why poetry (or any deep, true writing) is so essential, so life-saving in our times — in a world where genocide is rationalised, where species are obliterated, where so much is lost...

Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident  propositions — not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

[...]

...in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Embodied writing, writing that feels as richly as it thinks, that witnesses, that has passion, suffering and joy is not an indulgence but essential and vital.

Audre Lorde wrote on the erotic nature of writing at length, defining the erotic as an assertion of the life force, of creative energy empowered and reclaimed:

We tend to think of the erotic as easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us towards living in a fundamental way.

This life force is connected to the joy we take in life, not as an escape from or an opposite to all the suffering of the world, but as an act of resistance. Life will always contain suffering — we love and lose love, we love what dies — but this is not to acquiesce to systems of power that destroy life. This is not to bend to stories that crush and trample life. 

Once we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand for ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence...

In the summer I worked with two wonderful groups of writers exploring how we make our writing more impactful by writing through the body. This doesn't always mean writing about the body, though can certainly include this. It is always writing with all the senses open, writing that is direct, precise, sensual, and speaks for itself with power. And it does so because it invites us into the writer's experience in a way that no amount of telling can ever communicate.

Such writing is as political as it is intimate. Such writing acknowledges the deepest suffering whilst celebrating every scrap of tenderness, compassion and joy that life affords us. 

In 2025, one of the most books embodied, lucid, acutely observed books I’ve come across will be published. It’s by Nikki Ali and it’s been a priviliege to read it in progress.

I'm in love with her character, Mira — an Hispanic-American, married to Andre and in polyamorous relationships with Paloma and Araceli, a young woman living with Cystic Fibrosis against the backdrop of an impoverished childhood with an unstable, drug-dependent mother who goes on throwing challenges into her complex life. And Nikki tells her story in all its glorious, messy, joyous, sensual, heart-breaking fullness. 

In this passage Mira is struggling with her gastronomy tube after her fragile health has left her unable to keep feeding herself enough to nourish her tiny body. She's also experienced a rejection event with her lung transplant plus some other challenges I won't spoil (the book will be out in early Spring 2025). The excerpt is a session with the hospital counselor:

Out of all the things, I find myself spending almost my entire session talking about the orchids that my girlfriend gave me for Valentine’s Day, just before I came here. (Is Paloma even still my girl? Do girls who have to get fed through a tube in their tummies even get to do something badass and edgy like polyamory?) “They’re dead now, they’re gone,” I tell the counselor. “They were for me, especially for me because orchids were, like, one of our things. Orchids are expensive and luxurious and hard to get. I had never had orchids before. But they died while I was stuck in here alone and now they’re gone. They were for me and I didn’t get to enjoy them.”

“How does that make you feel, Mira?” she asks me gently.

My eyes fill with tears, so hot and dangerous they feel like lava, two little volcanoes right on my face. “Well, it makes me feel jealous and sad and so, so fucking angry. It makes me feel stupid and ungrateful. You know? Because I’m here and I know I’m supposed to be fucking grateful. For the fucking miracle of just being alive.” I take off my face mask. It’s soaked with my tears anyway and can’t be all that effective. “But I don’t want to just fucking be alive. I was happy. I was happy and I want to go back to that. I don’t want to grieve or lie around recovering or be sick. I had orchids and I had a girlfriend and I was having all this incredible sex and I had a list. Of amazing things I was doing. So I want to skip past all of this dumb shit and get back to my joy.”

I cry for the rest of the session. Crying hurts and it exhausts me. At the end of the session, the counselor calls the nurse and he takes me back to my room in a wheelchair and puts me in bed. I hug myself and cry myself raw. The pain feels almost delicious. Maybe I am not the girl I was before. I have a feeding tube, I had a major rejection episode, I had a second heartbeat where one was not supposed to be. I remember what the tarot reader said, about conflicting desires. Maybe I should be more sad about those things. But I am still a girl who can get all in her feelings about her dead flowers. And that feels fucking good.

There's a lot of light and laughter in this book too. A lot of tenderness and rawness and the richness of being alive. But even in the depths of sorrow there is a love of life, a joy in the gaps between struggle, exactly what Audre Lorde was writing about. Mira's Story is erotic on many levels and deeply so in the way it enables us to 

demand for ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. 

Our creative energy is a deep life force. Here's to using it to nurture and share the joy.