contemplative writing 5

 

The main point isn’t really to excruciate over whether something is or isn’t contemplative writing, but to realize with openness that all things can be contemplative and then start doing those things in your writing process.

I worked as a research assistant, part time, for several years for a professor of Contemplative Writing. On the job, I got to transcribe the words of over 30 of her students as they reflected upon their experience in this class. Most if not all of her students had life changing experience in the class that she offered. It not only involved writing and working on a large writing project over the course of the year, but also immersion in silence, more silence than they were used to or comfortable with, and also experience in nature and community. Also there was a travel element to the class.

We traveled as a class together to a monastery in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton once lived, plus a Sisterhood nearby, and a Buddhist monastery too, and other years of the same class visited the desert in Arizona.