Listening for the Knock

The terror + the magic of starting before we know where we're going

The Webs We Weave is a free weekly-ish newsletter on being in flux, staying connected to ourselves and our creativity, and feeling more connected in the world.

In the past month I’ve written about the power of really good questions, assembling your notebook stack for 2024, and poetry as a vehicle for feeling our feelings. I love hearing which pieces resonate with you, so I can create more of them! 💛

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For most of last year I was stuck in a reading rut. No book could hold my interest.

The one that finally ended the drought last month was Nicole Antoinette's newest book, What We Owe to Ourselves, where she recounts her thru-hiking adventures on the Colorado Trail.

I wasn't really familiar with the term "thru-hiking" before, but essentially it means to hike continuously from one end of a long-distance trail (like the PCT or the Appalachian Trail) to the other. While I'm in no way convinced that I'm cut out for that kind of physical or outdoorsy intensity, there is something deeply and inherently appealing to me about the clarity of having a trail, a map, and a plan: knowing exactly what you set out to do, what the finish line looks like, and the path you'll take to get there.

There's an undeniable comfort for me in knowing where I'm going.

For about five months, I've stuck to my weekday morning practice of showing up religiously for Writer's Hour at 8am to work on my writing. Some days I come to the page knowing exactly what I want to work on and I zoom ahead. Other days the road is rockier, the fog is thicker.

I can't help but notice how badly my mind wants to bail at the first sign of resistance.

My eyes are always the first thing to give me away. My vision melting into a soft haze, drifting past my screen and out my office windows to the trees across the street. Or, my eyes might flit toward my phone searching for an escape hatch in the form of a dopamine-laden distraction.

A restlessness builds in my body as the fear that I'm lost beyond repair grows louder and more frantic, rushing toward meaning-making like a stone skipping across a lake: how will this meandering, jumbled blob possibly become essay-shaped? what if nothing I write means anything?

This panicky urge to bail has everything to do with my longstanding, deep-seated desire to know exactly where I'm going before I take my first steps—to see the whole picture from square one with a sense of direction that says, "I have a plan and I'm on the right track."

I think it's part of what always makes the idea of a project so seductive—something like

#The100DayProject Newsletter

or NaNoWriMo or

A Year of Writing Dangerously

: it’s the promise of a path to follow, a sanctioned structure that leads to a complete and recognizable end. And it's an infinitely more soothing proposition than just showing up every morning and... writing aimlessly in to the abyss.

Cody Cook-Parrott

often uses their work to explore the difference between discipline and devotion—or as they put it, "moving from rigidity to awe."

I've been thinking a lot about those two words lately.

Discipline has always come relatively easily to me¹, probably because it feels a lot like control—the kind that feeds my hunger for structure, my cravings for a formula. Discipline, to me, looks like showing up again and again and again. It represents the rigidity and the 'startup energy' we might need to begin something new, and it’s the proof we can point to that says we're 'doing it right.'

But then inevitably, as we've all experienced, life happens. Our rhythms get interrupted, we get sick, our capacity shrinks, we slam into some other form of obstacle or resistance—and we're left with a choice:

We can beat ourselves up for 'failing' or 'being bad a follow-through', or, we can turn toward devotion.

“Knowing exactly what I am devoted to keeps me out of having to prove it to anyone, publicly or privately. [...] This took me many years to cultivate and become dedicated to, knowing where discipline has pigeon holed me and where starting with devotion can both bring me back to discipline if I so desire, or into an even bigger form of expansion."
- Cody Cook-Parrott

Showing up to Writer's Hour day after day as proof of my dedication is one thing. But refusing to turn against myself or make it mean something when things feel hard? When the inner critic starts to wail, when I'm sinking in quicksand, when I lose the path and can't imagine ever finding it again?

That is another thing entirely.

If discipline is about proving and proof, I think devotion must be about orientation and trust.

This distinction has almost become like a little prayer, orienting me an inch at a time away from urgency and meaning-making, and toward much more interesting questions.

If I had nothing to prove, where would I want to direct my focus and attention?
If I had nothing to prove, how would I lovingly repsond to what’s happening in my body?
If I had nothing to prove, what would I do next? What might I be willing to try?

Recently in a workshop with teacher and poet Brendan Constantine, he led us down a little side road about stanzas. A stanza, as you likely know, is a grouping of lines in a poem—but it's also the Italian word for room.

"You can think of stanzas as the 'rooms' of your poem."

He veered into a story of a writer whose father had just died, who knew he wanted to write about his dad and his grief. But every time he sat down to do it, he’d freeze. Nothing would come out and he'd think, I don't know how to do this.

The advice this writer got from his mentor was both simple and encouraging: knowing that he wanted to write about his dad was enough. Now his job was simply to write—about anything!—and to listen for his dad’s knock. He'll tell you which poem he wants to enter.

A writer’s work, I’ve learned, often has two subjects: there’s the thing we sit down planning to write about, and there’s the second, truer thing that emerges later in the writing process. And as Brendan reminded me, in order for that second, truer thing to reveal itself, we have to be willing to just. start. writing.

“If you accept that your true subject might be something that arrives later, you might need to get a few rooms built so that it has a door to knock on.”

Maybe the real beauty of getting ink on the page without knowing where we’re going is the way it leaves space for the right finish line to come and find us—to come knocking, to show us the way.

Until next time,
Michelle

1. it feels real weird to talk about 'discipline' and how easily it comes to be as an able-bodied, generally neurotypical, cis white person. I do my best to resist assigning moral value to our culturally-accepted ideas of what 'being disciplined' looks like. (I'm working on it! That social conditioning is REAL, man.) It also feels important to acknowledge the many ways the morality of 'discipline' is often weaponized to dehumanize, exploit, or shame ourselves and each other—particularly our fat, disabled, neurodivergent, poor, and otherwise marginalized friends.