Know Your Source

by Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo

EGG I was awake around two in the morning the other night and I started to think about the recent egg recall. (That being, after all, a perfectly reasonable thing to do at two in the morning.) And the concept of half a billion eggs seemed staggering. I possess an inability to fathom numbers that large. I get it intellectually, but I am left with the sense that I am missing something essential because thinking on a scale that immense somehow escapes me. I need things to be reduced, to be in smaller chunks, to be localized in order to understand them meaningfully. When I thought about all those bad eggs and all those sick people, I felt grateful that I have some local resources for our food as well as the awareness of its importance. For instance, I buy my milk at a dairy farm in the farming community one town over from my own. Whenever I can, I like to know the details of where our food comes from. With our milk, I wanted to know how the cows were treated, if they were administered hormones and antibiotics, of what their diet consisted. Were they free to graze. (Were they happy cows?) So, I simply asked the farmer who I see every time I go buy our milk. It doesn’t get more local than that.

From there, I began to think about writing and the importance of knowing your creative source.

Writing is a spiritual act. Writing at its best comes from an inner well – a passionate center. The saying goes write what you know which is wise. But nothing is ever so simple. You can know many things and yet be merely skimming the surface. You can say I am hungry and know what that means. But can you articulate how that hunger feels, exactly how that hunger resides in your body. Its shape, its roundness or heft. Its edges. Its reach.

Then there is that which you know with a depth that defies language. Those are the things about which you must write. For which the words must be located.

I believe that the things that are truly known – the things that are extracted joyfully or painfully from our bones – are the things that come from our source. That place of absolute truth. You know truth – it is the thing you cannot deny. Your body will always know truth even as you might try to reject or ignore it. Try it – when you utter a truthful statement or think it, emotions and sensations arise. This is the source. This is the place from which you write.

Once, a writing professor said that thinking of the heart as the center of love or heartbreak in the body had gone out of fashion. He said it was precious. (He meant cheesy, I think.) But I disagree. I never would have said so then. But I know now, and I knew then, that the body knows truth. When we write from that place, the work is good because it is authentic.

Move into those soft and tender places, the hard places that push back, especially the places you don’t want to go and to those which you want to joyously return again and again. You know them. Come back to those places. Keep coming back to those places. Reach into those depths. Whatever it means to you, return again and again to your source. The real writing will swell and bloom from there. Maybe easily, maybe with hardship, but it will.

It’s interesting that this happened to the egg, although I wonder if the metaphor will go unnoticed. The egg is not only a symbol of but an actual beginning, a seed, an inception. An origin. This is what happens when the source is corrupted and desecrated; that sacred well contaminated. Something rarefied is lost. I think writers must seek means to stay connected with that which is their deepest truth – that which is the source. It is the thing that is so real that it is almost tangible. It is the thing that is undeniable. Scary, painful, joyous, panic-inducing, essentially understandable, entirely incomprehensible. As a writer, this is the place you must go.

Share with us: How do you expose, uncover, stumble upon your source? How do you know when you’ve gotten there?

Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo is a writer, reader, yogini (when she can squeeze it in), mom, part-time Office Manager, a homemaker and the Coordinator and Writer for The Writer’s Life blog. She loves to cook and take long walks with her kids and is a woman who wants to meaningfully exchange and intersect with other women writers. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Currently she works at a web development company (because part-time Office Manager buys more groceries than Struggling Writer). She is at work on a novel and a short story collection. Melissa lives in North Central Massachusetts with her family.