Here’s another sample conversation between two Understory members. This time, Karen Smith chats with Charlotte about how mindfulness and writing entwine for her, and why she loves wild swimming.
Charlotte Gann: Hi Karen, thank you for such a lovely walk the other afternoon. I really enjoyed our chat, and one thing I came away thinking was: maybe you, like me, are a bit of a magpie? In the sense, I’ve done lots of personal development with great commitment over twenty five years, and each chapter has given me so much: but I’ve not (yet!) bought in exclusively to just one system.
I also know mindfulness is close to your creative practice? Is that right? Can you say a bit more about how this works for you?
Karen Smith: Yes, thank you Charlotte, I can absolutely identify with the magpie tendency you describe. I think there’s a natural human tendency to want to connect with others but also with one’s own psyche – to understand the perplexities and paradoxes of simply being, and also to feel less alone. But I do agree that there’s no one single ‘silver bullet’ because that’s just the nature of consciousness: it’s a big web of interconnecting, endlessly undulating and hypnotic threads. But it’s also discombobulating and nauseating at times!
I came to mindfulness about a decade ago, before it exploded on the popular scene; after years of struggling to function under the pall of social anxiety and depression, it seemed to offer the most promise yet for a kind of ballast on what felt like a relentlessly stormy sea. I attended an eight-week course in Brighton, which was revolutionary in the sense that it reconnected me with my internal chatter. It opened my eyes to all the noise that’s there all the time, and magnetising my mood, even without me realising what’s happening.
After that I did a creative writing course and the sense of the writing process became entwined with my new sense of mindfulness of self.
And though I’m not religious, I’ve always been fascinated with monasticism and Buddhism – a broader kind of spirituality – which, ever since I was a child (of books!) seemed to be most evident when I was reading. Some of the most insightful and helpful things I’ve read recently, touching on the mindful aspect of the creative writing process, are 13 Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice by Buddhist poet Maitreyabandhu, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Poetry and the Sacred by Don Domanski.
CG: Hey Karen, thanks for those – great recommendations. I’ll add them to our Other Resources page. I also remember loving the Maitreyabandhu essay when it was published online by Magma. Such sane sense.
So much for me to connect with in what you’ve touched on: the relentlessly stormy sea, yes, and the tension between connecting with others, and connecting in a real way with ourselves. I love the way you mention ballast, too – a coincidence. I was just this week thinking about ballast, and about the idea of the grit in the oyster: that no pearl is formed without the irritant of the grit. (It’s a protective response where the oyster works and works to relieve the irritation around the grit that leads eventually to the pearl. It wraps something around the grit, which feels a bit to me like a metaphor for how shame may work in my psyche: hiding, silencing, hiding, silencing, until: eventually, I can speak.) My explorations in personal development, and in writing are definitely closely ‘entwined’ for me too: lovely word. And yes, it’s been a long quest to understand things and feel more comfortable, and the writing and writing development has massively been part of that.
Maitreyabandhu writes in his essay: ‘Deep poems, achieved poems, are written by deep people. If you want to write well you need to live deeply, you need to develop yourself.’ And he closes with this: ‘A poet therefore needs to observe vividly, feel strongly, reflect deeply and think rigorously. They need to cultivate robust sympathy for others, while at the same time developing a genuine independence of mind – without which there is no poetry.’
Does this speak to you?
KS: Your description of the pearl, grit and oyster literally glowed in my mind – yes I identify with that. And the Buddhist idea of ‘thanking the spoon’, which is rather less poetic but along the same lines; remembering to be grateful for the packets of pain that we reactively push away but somehow or another work their way into us, smoothing out the edges. Yes there’s momentum in having something to move against isn’t there? In writing and life. I think we tend to forget that, adjusted as we are to our increasingly materialistic and comfort-studded age; and that’s something poetry can remind us of. The restrictions of form, shadows of censorship and political repression, whims of the publishing machine and unforgiving indifference of critics and readers are all levelled against us but they’re also currents of energy to build muscle against.
Wow, what a powerful and profound quote by Maitreyabandhu. I think that one’s going to stay with me! It seems absolutely true that poetry is about depth – what else? But depth at a cost: whatever unknown is there, in its necessarily rooted and buried state, demands from us patience, attention, a kind of devotion to looking (eliciting the ‘vivid’) and an openness and a willingness to see even into the webbed corners of the rooms of our minds. The poem I wrote about the childhood memory of being on a ghost train with my sister looms – a persistent apparition – as if to underline how terrifying it is to bear a glimpse of our hauntings.
I’m not sure I’m very much further along in having my eyes open, but I’m working on the reflecting and thinking and it seems that the pandemic has brought about this ‘deeper’, stiller current, opening up more space for this way of being. Suddenly the splashing, thrashing and mindless striving has fallen away. Which is balancing.
My internal response to those phrases you quoted – ‘robust sympathy’ and ‘independence of mind’ – was a kind of mental cheerleading from the sidelines (with the kind of joy that spills a little fancy footwork onto the pitch and doesn’t care who sees). That combination of strength and sensitivity is something I try to emulate in everyday life. I’m a rebel at heart and believe in authenticity, originality and all the freedoms we can mobilise and fight for. And for me, reading and writing poetry is a key part of that work. At the same time I can lose my emotional balance and feel transparent, hopelessly flawed, deskinned and at sea in the most mundane situation. Thankfully, I have a good therapist to restate that ‘over-sensitive’ is a misnomer. I think that’s why my habit of wild swimming feels magical and elemental to me; there’s something in the yielding and the surrender, in breaking-through the apprehension to embrace what’s challenging but ultimately enriching to body and soul. So again, I find myself couching the process of poetic work in terms of spiritual growth; at least in aspiration toward inspiration. One day someone will come along with a measuring stick and see just how big the gap is between imagination and reality. The wabi-sabi crack.
CG: Gosh K, so much I resonate with, while also watching your own idiosyncratic dances along the pitchline. (One of the deep brilliances, for me, of all our Understory Conversations, is noticing and opening appreciatively to all the riches around me that each other member brings. This includes ways of expressing ourselves – which of course run into our poetry.)
I resonate completely with the whole idea of how we need something to push against as we grow – and the restraints of our creative practice (poetic forms included) provide some of that, as do the strictures of the outside world and its ignoring or rebuffings of our efforts!
Also, though, the way our greatest pains can turn out to be our material, or give us the resolve we need to keep trying. I feel this keenly: that my work and my writing is in this area, of human suffering. And my grit and ballast both emanate from my own experience of pain and struggle.
I won’t be ashamed of this. Or I will, still, at times, and habitually, but I won’t let that stop me.
So yes, I feel I’m a rebel too, at heart, and believe in authenticity – though I spent a lot of life trying to toe the line, while feeling at sea in the most mundane circumstances. (‘The Black Water // is lapping at your cup and saucer. / Do you really not see it?’ as I express this in one poem in Noir.) And yes, deskinned. But it’s this work, and the writing work that give me containment. Let us rebels unite? Maybe that could be another framing of The Understory Conversation?
And yes, what a gulf there is between fantasy and reality – and yet, our writing practice is made up of small concrete steps taken every day, and in the real world…
One of the things I really like about your responses is your deep acceptance that things are topsy turvy – the sea we’re in is. And it’s up to us, then, to work to gain some semblance of balance, and appreciate the times we manage it; and have compassion and self-compassion for the times we simply can’t? Learn to let the sea hold us?
I understand entirely why you love wild swimming, I think. Makes me think of the Portishead song ‘Deep Water’: do you know it? When it comes on, I always smile to myself, thinking of it as a quiet Understory Conversation theme tune, somehow.
Shall we leave it there, then, for now? And end with your poem ‘Ghost train’.
KS: Yes, C, and thanks…
Ghost train Even before we clattered into the blackness, I was already there. Eyes shut, head buried in your hair. Ruffling and screeching like hens, our bellies cracked like eggs. My insides strained to escape, to get between us and them. “You're missing it, look!”, you elbowed me, but I’d seen too many monsters already, and the bangs, the bangs hurt. No way of getting to the end any faster. We were just dolls, and nobody thought to make anything to comfort them. Yes, the skeleton might be crap and home-made and just bones, his wife smiling and beautiful when she wasn’t becoming a hag. I still wondered, though, how you could laugh so convincingly. But you were older and brassier, and now there’s light enough, you were the one Mum shut in the cupboard, the one who'd made friends with the dark. Karen Smith from Schist, Smith|Doorstop, 2019.
- Schist by Karen Smith is available from Smith|Doorstop
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