Honoring the voice, celebrating the sacred space

By Allison


Saturday morning and the sky is crying, sheets of icy rain are bursting out of the gray. I sit snug in front of the fire, contemplating Marcy’s post, missing Don and thinking about voice and expression, art and literature. Don, by the way, (the hack without a picture – my bad) is working in the rain to create the sacred space for us to honor the voice.

When he leaves, he says, “write.”

There is so much I must not do: Worry about what must be done, stress over piles of work sitting on my desk in the newsroom or censor the wild voice that informs the writing. Censor her and she’ll rear her ugly head and roar, leaving fragments of drivel on the page.

Where does she come from, that voice? She is the one who says things I would never say out loud. She frightens others – she frightens me sometimes with the things she says. That’s what I like about her.
She’s the mystical, magical unconscious and she’s like driving from one place to another and wondering how you got there. She’s like mining for gold.

I will spend much of the day immersed in the letters of Virginia Woolf. The Bloomsbury group – Leonard and Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Clive Bell – they honored the art and the voice. They communed in their sacred space and made their passion, their art, the focal point of their lives. Minds, bodies, souls. They said, “This expression matters.” They said, “This is what we are called to do.”

The studied and critiqued literature, wrote and reviewed and celebrated. Through the madness and the pennilessness, they persevered for the art – for the voice. Don and I envision our sacred space much the same – our hack group, though lighthearted, honors our expression by honoring the voice.

Dishonor her and she falls silent.