Connect to Universal Compassion

Are you sure you felt it? A deeper analysis of slow and deliberate reading

In this Exclusive Writing Lab, we continue our teaching from Cherish This Ecstasy by David James Duncan.

We’ve allowed ourselves to steep into that pesky vat of "feelings.” We’ve imagined the possibility that we have “needs” connected to what we read, too. And in visiting both, we are freed to see the whole of this work in a new way. The story is no longer something to pull close, push away, judge, or figure out. It is. That’s a lovely thing to contemplate. Art “is.”

My girl at the Musée d'Orsay capturing a dancer.

And, yes, a piece of writing can be experienced as powerfully, even wordlessly, in the same way as when standing before a remarkable sculpture, or drawing, or painting. Or a sunrise. Or a sunset. Or when watching a hawk dive from the sky and into the steel surface of a river, then lift off in a beating of wings with a caught fish.

We know that writing is the art form of the mind but it doesn’t have to live in our minds and certainly doesn’t have to be trapped in the prison cell of our reactivity.

Writing can be experienced, broadly and memorably and without explanation, and it can…if we allow it…melt barriers and give us access to collective experience. We can become a man bereft on a veranda at sunset, knowing our wife is off dancing in the arms of another man. We can feel the heartbreak of that, the helplessness, the hopelessness, too. We have felt that in our lifetimes. We know disappointment. We can be disappointed in that moment, as this man. Not with him. AS him.

We can look up and see two flickers mating over our heads and feel his (our) surprise for a moment. What the…?

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