Writing in the Dirt

Sep 1

JENNIFER J. CAMP

4 min read ⭑

My high school English teacher couldn’t read my handwriting.

“It looks like spaghetti. Too many loops and swirls.”

I never held the pencil correctly; the base of my thumb would hook clumsily around the wooden yellow shaft, grasping the side of my index finger rather than delicately using my thumb’s and index finger’s tips.

I remember her frustration as she told me my pencil scrawls were too exasperating to decipher, and how she wanted me to begin writing in print. And I did, my fingers scraping the pencil lead onto binder paper to make marks that formed letters that spelled words that made sentences that communicated my heart.

Can you hear it now, my heart?

As high schoolers, we did not type our essays — so the paper beneath my hand was a tactile, neutral landscape for a story I was waiting to be told. But who would tell me the story so I could hear it? Who would tell me the story so I could write it?

Even as a child, years before I stood before my red-faced English teacher and endured her berating me about my handwriting, I knew that the gift of writing was more than the tactile, sensory expression through forming words upon a page. Rather, at its most fundamental, it was interaction — ongoing conversation — between me and me.

Writing was a gateway to an interior world, rich with mystery and complexity.

You heard me. You knew me before you knew you knew me.

And so I learned to keep my eyes closed, my senses pulling in so I hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing. So I can hear everything. Feel everything. See everything.

There you are. Nowhere. And completely here.

I have practiced this technique — of escaping from myself to interact with myself, to tell stories to myself, to know myself — for decades. The exterior world we inhabit is vast and mysterious and beautiful, but what about the world within? What about the world within ourselves that we pay so little attention to — shun, even, when it tries desperately to speak?

Why do we despise ourselves so very much? Why do we refuse to be our very best friend? Why do we look elsewhere, everywhere, but within ourselves, into these hearts that fundamentally know God, to decipher meaning? How can we know what anything means without knowing, more than anything or anyone else, who, with (and without) God, we are?

These are the questions that led me deeper into the practice of writing as listening.

While God continues to speak to our hearts even when we struggle with self-dislike, I cannot truly hear what God is saying unless I first respect my own heart. Without self-respect, I lose the ability to write truthful stories or listen openly to your stories, because my heart remains closed. To accurately hear any story — whether yours or my own — and respond with kindness, I must first have the integrity to listen to my own heart with authentic kindness. Only when I can genuinely accept and love myself can I be truly authentic in loving you.

One of the stories in me lives in John chapter 8, verses 6-8, where the Pharisees bring an adulterous woman to Jesus, demanding he condemn her to stoning. Instead, Jesus draws in the dirt, his eyes on the ground, not looking up as the crowd circles and intensifies in frustration, self-righteousness and anger. I am the woman, aware of her sin, aflame with fear and shame. And I am also the woman, hope-filled and pure, who has known Jesus since the beginning. She rests near him, watching his fingers trace patterns on the ground.

“For each of us speaks the words like a dance of sound, each letter a collection of music. I can hear it.”

Form a letter. Make a shape. Draw a circle. Create a picture.

I hear his breathing, his air filling my lungs, his heart’s rhythm becoming how I sync my own. I listen to the story he is writing in me.

Let me read it. Let me read you.

I feel the dirt underneath my fingers. They are sore from the pressure of the scraping, for the dirt has rocks in it, small jagged edges of gray and white. The words stay imprinted on my fingers, and I feel the story. I know the story’s heart beating. I let it push out and through, together — me, her, you, Jesus. All of us speak and sing and point to the story of the beginning.

Haven’t you always known it?

Yes? Me too.

It is so personal, our own stories. Let us appreciate them and not judge them, especially as we attempt to translate them to one another. For each of us speaks the words like a dance of sound, each letter a collection of music. I can hear it. I watch your face as you listen, and feel, and absorb it too.

This Place

I know you wonder how to unlock it
unlock gravity
but I will release you from the expectation
that everything is fine here
everything is fine
when you let me capture you
your mind, your heart
and free you from the rigidity of thinking
city streets are not golden pathways
to possibility
or thirsty flowers, bent in the sun,
are forgotten, for I call them
call them beautiful
and awake in you the muscle to
dislodge doubt from your reality
your reality with
boundaries and borders,
barriers and blockades
to this place where we are together,
this place where freedom lives.

“You have to trust that the inner voice that shows the way is not the voice of the illusion, but the voice of God. You need to allow yourself to be loved by that voice so deeply that you can let go of the compulsions and the inner criticisms that prevent you from being compassionate with yourself.” —Henri Nouwen

Do you hear the voice that is in your heart? Do you trust it?

Do you let that voice love you so deeply that you can let go of the compulsions and the inner criticisms that prevent you from being compassionate with yourself?

Jennifer Camp is a poet and listener who delights in investigating the deeper places of the heart. She founded Gather Ministries with her husband, Justin, is Editor-at-Large of Rapt Interviews and manages Loop Collective, a community for women who reject complacency and pursue connection with God.