The Truth of my Life

What is the “truth” of my life?

Every week, I prepare myself to write this blog. I have a set practice that I do, and it ends with a writing prayer I wrote in India, during the writing of my memoir. At the end of the prayer, I say, “and may the flow from my pen speak the truth of my life.”

To share the truth of myself, I find I need to be in a state of openness. Of seeing what comes rather than planning what I will produce. Working at it feels like an inner exploration to capture what is real for me in the present moment of my life.

Yesterday, Avrom Altman’s Flowers of Emptiness, Imaginal Haiku, arrived in the mail and I picked it up and started flipping through it. I was blown away. Here’s an example:

sunset at tree line

stillness fills this empty bowl

nothing changes shape

Avrom was on my course at Sherborne, known as Larry then. He’s mentioned in my memoir—we’ve known each other since 1973. We’ve each been traveling this path over all these years. He’s a wonderful Movements teacher and became a psychotherapist. I did not know he wrote Haiku.

When I read one of Avrom’s poems, it touches me deeply because he is sharing the truth of his life. For instance:

I am old and slow

children pick my pockets clean

soon birds will my bones

That one brought a smile.

My point is, to touch the truth of my life I must have a relationship with my life—the deep, the superficial, what makes me sad, what tickles me.

I see Avrom’s distillation of himself related to the work I’ve been doing with section forty-four in Madam de Salzmann’s book, The Reality of Being. What I’m trying to practice is taking an inner “impression” of myself. At the end of my morning exercise, I visualize a moment of interaction that will happen later in my day. I “decide” to take an impression in such a moment. Madam suggests we hold the two impressions together at both points in our day.

This effort has provided a couple of fleeting but profound “impressions” of myself. Like Avrom’s Haiku, a truth is captured. In one instance, I saw and heard myself say something unfeeling as I greeted my husband at the breakfast table. But I also saw the heart-felt spontaneity of jumping up, hugging him, and apologizing.

With this ongoing work of capturing an impression of myself, I’ve also come to see how important the preparation is. When I have a solid morning exercise and take time to “prepare” I’m far more successful.

The next step is to gather these impressions into a collection showing me the unfiltered truth of my life.