Unwriting Ourselves

Becoming messy, mad, mundane — human.

To trace the contours of a map with our fingertips is not to experience the real, living, breathing world with both feet — to touch it with both hands and heart — one in which we are all simply passengers, passing through. Some may call it dance.

So many of us feel that we don’t quite fit in, or on, to this ancient vibrant rock we live upon.

But this one wild and strangely beautiful planet is utterly consumed by millions and miles of holes, burrows, books and nooks and crannies, caves and deep pools we may enter only ‘at our own risk’ according to someone.

As if a risk was not worth risking? As if we were not sensing and feeling creatures, willing to be led gloriously astray at the touch of a feather on a bright September day?

We make sense of life by writing and walking it.

I recently shared a short film entitled ‘Em-BOG-iment’ filmed by talented filmmaker Tony Whelan, in my homeland of east Clare, which documents a real life encounter with the bog herself, as a means of falling (if subhumanly possible) even deeper in love with the big, bad, beautiful bog. But that’s a tale for another day, which if you are interested in watching you can find here https://www.albalanna.com/research.

As humans we access these strange terrains when we want answers to life, to fear. We fear the unknown, I suppose, because it’s not solid. We can only ever either dream up, fear, or plan our way into it.

I think most of us secretly long for the deep unknowns. And maybe that’s why we tell stories, talk to strangers, tell jokes.

But something that’s been on my mind lately is the very act of writing itself - in particular, writing about personal experience. Does the act of writing provide us with more insight and knowledge, or less?

I often wonder, is a life we write about ‘the thing itself’ or a ‘view of the thing’?

As a passenger in a shaking universe, I gobble up stories, like most of us, weary of the world and ready to find another one whether in books, dreams, or pictures.

Fictitious ‘otherworlds’ have been often more real to me than experience itself. And then there was that grass, that grass tying me down - fundamental to life, fundamental to feeling.

Something I’ve been peering into lately, is how writing about life can actually, sometimes, take away from it.

But then, I guess it depends on who you are, and what you are writing about. I certainly agree that writing about something challenging we are going through can bring about great healing, understanding — a sort of inner quiet that beats beyond the pages and makes life shimmer again, ever so slight.

Still, the difficulty I think lies more so in writing about beauty, care, love, and a gorgeousness that resides beyond the layers of the physical realm (and yes, I recognise the total irony and inception in even beginning to write this down).

These lovely things are imperative to existence, and without beauty and nature and noticing, life would be nothing short of a living death.

But when life is beautiful, good, and reliable, simple as it should be — the writing can sometimes take away from ‘existence’.

There, that is the mystery, that is the question, that sits within this digital age, like sap bleeding out of a tree.

Shall we write of this experience or shall be let it shape us into who we are?

‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise’

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

Since childhood I have been writing about becoming, in a sense, reflected by experience. Through the lens of different creatures, adventures, I used writing as a way to manage change and uncertainty.

And yet how ironic, to reflect upon a reflection?

We live in an age of so much ‘online presence’ that glides and only hides much of what lives beneath, behind closed doors, behind clothes. We are influenced by each other but we are not each other, and we don’t always know what life is like for all these people who show and speak online.

Don’t get me wrong, writing is wonderful. And, beyond our own personal writing, I think social media is a useful tool for inspiration and sharing and kinship but it can also derail, and lead us only further away from truth.

I am interested in the ways by which we as a species exist in harmony and disharmony with each other. Of how we are reshaped and rediscovered, in a sense,