I changed some of the paintings in my bedroom a few weeks ago. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, this painting, by my late father-in-law Michihiro Yoshida, is the first thing to greet me.

I love the comfort of the deep blue, as well as the complementary blue/green, the side of the color palette that has always felt most soothing.  And while I’ve had this painting in the house for years, I’ve never looked at it so closely and consistently until I moved it into the bedroom. In addition to taking it in on first waking, I gaze across at it when I’m meditating, and sometimes, when I feel like I’m foaming at the mouth in frustration because whatever I’m trying to write feels like a stuck and hopeless endeavor.

I just gaze into that blue vortex and breathe. The writing may or may not come, but at least I start feeling a little bit calmer. And eventually, as if I’m standing with my toes curled on the cold mossy edge of a pond surrounded by deep green trees, I’m ready to dive in.

The act of writing, especially when we give ourselves permission to speak our truths–whether real or fictionally dressed– is like entering a vortex, a place where we might lose control of the carefully constructed selves we’ve fabricated to present to the unsafe world. Writing is like the cave journey I took a couple of summers ago in Oregon–how we walked down, down, down, the light evaporating into nothing until we were in a place that was so dark, all we could do was hold on to the rope and trust as we continued to take careful steps on the wet stones. And even when we flicked on the flashlight to get our bearings, all we could see were the dimmest of boundaries.

That’s what writing is about: dimming the boundaries; entering the vortex.

And when/if we can do this, or even take a few small steps closer to this state, we can be rewarded, as this painting reminds us, with the whoosh of our words rising out of us like the funnel cloud of eggs bursting forth from the center.

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