For My Writing Friends Who Spin: I Give You Rumi

A handful of times this week, people I work with told me they have a hard time writing because their heads spin. As in, I can’t follow a thought to completion because my brain is a tornado. As in, You can’t see me because I’m busy going round and round. As in, I can’t see me because I’m so busy moving.

I was thinking about how to manage this problem, and then I read about Rumi, the King Of Spin, in Toko-pa Turner’s book Belonging, and it occurred to me that maybe problem was the wrong word. Maybe the correct word to describe my writing friends’ situation is opportunity or freedom. Or self.

Toko-pa wrote: “One of the greatest stories of longing followed is the one told of Rumi who, when his beloved teacher Shams of Tabrizi was murdered, began to circle a pillar in his courtyard. Struck with grief and longing for reunion with Shams, who had introduced Rumi to music and poetry, he turned and turned, grieved and longed. As he did, a holy portal opened up and poetry started tumbling out of him.”

What if writers are blocked by what feels like spin because their bodies aren’t keeping up with their heads? What if, when you feel your head spin in a way that feels disorienting or confusing, you allow the holy portal to open—what if you throw yourself into the fire of it all and agree with the confusion, with the disorientation? What if the straight line is not the answer, not the story? What if what you really need to write is the wildness of the deeply confused, the wildly spun?

What if words such as plot and introduction and linear narrative and transitions and thesis are the language of madmen?

What would you write then?

Lose yourself,
Lose yourself in this love.
When you lose yourself in this love,
you will find everything.

Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Do not fear this loss,
For you will rise from the earth
and embrace the endless heavens.

Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Escape from this earthly form, 
For this body is a chain
and you are its prisoner.
Smash through the prison wall
and walk outside with the kings and princes.

Lose yourself,
Lose yourself at the foot of the glorious King. When you lose yourself
before the King
you will become the King.

Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Escape from the black cloud
that surrounds you.
Then you will see your own light
as radiant as the full moon.

Now enter that silence. 
This is the surest way
to lose yourself. . . .

What is your life about, anyway?—
Nothing but a struggle to be someone,
Nothing but a running from your own silence.

―Rumi: In the Arms of the Beloved