It Pays To Muse And Move

Yesterday afternoon, I took part in Musings & Movement With Gayle Brandeis and Rebecca Evans , a  Zoom gathering described as a "monthly mind and body connection to help inspire and care for the writer." I dabble in yoga. I dabble in meditation. Gayle Brandeis and Rebecca Evans write for adults, which is my focus this year. 

You can see the attraction for me.

This session involved some talk, some short exercises, some short writing prompts, all in thirty minutes. It also was designed around sport and sport as a metaphor for writing. Rebecca talked about cross training in sport and how it develops other parts of our bodies. She used the metaphor of cross training with writing. What are the things we do that can develop our writing that are not writing?

This led me to think of the multitude of cooking posts I've done here, and I was sure I had one about having to fix something I'd cooked and how that was similar to having to fix something I'd written. Couldn't find it. 

Instead, I found Cooking Isn't That Different From Writing, a little long on making spinach soup and connecting it to rough drafts.

But I also found some taekwondo posts, including the nice short one I'm republishing below. Since Gayle and Rebecca were talking about sport and writing connections, this seems more apt. 

June 4, 2019 A Taekwondo/Writing Analogy   

Box o' TKD belts

You haven't seen me write about taekwondo in...ah...maybe six years, which was when I quit training. But I'm still going through my old writers' journals and found a post about breaking boards.

Everybody loves breaking boards, by the way.

Back in 2008 I wrote:

"The point of breaking is to perfect your kicks, to land them more accurately, and you can be doing that without breaking the board. You can be getting what you're supposed to be getting from the experience without seeing the board break."

A Place to Perfect Writing. Yeah.

I don't know where I got that. Presumably I thought of it myself, because I'm pretty obsessive about keeping track of citations. But looking at it now, I realize there's an obvious connection to writing.

One of the points of writing is to perfect the writing. You can be doing that without getting published. You can be getting what you're supposed to be getting from the experience without seeing your work published.

Ommmm.

Still More Thoughts Inspired by Muse & Movement

I also have a showshoeing/book writing analogy.

And while looking through old blog posts, I found one that I think I can modify for a Medium submission.

That was thirty minutes well spent yesterday. I can do it again the first Thursday of September.