To Hold the Holy Spirit of Creation. To Begin to Write Again.

New Year's Day is not the best day to try writing morning pages for the first time in many months.  It's not the day to want to get up and begin a process of kickstarting a creative surge where words tumble out into reasonable quality writing as once happened.  New Year's Day is not the day to think, "I'm going to set an alarm early, get up full of energy, and be disciplined enough to hand-write three pages of A4 paper with a cheap pen."  Not when New Year's Eve means that you know there's no point trying to sleep until the fireworks die down and afterwards only manage to doze due to a background of loud and perhaps drunken merriment just about in earshot from Newcastle Quayside or the city centre.

New Year's Day is a day to be gentle, to get up late if possible, to expect that any brilliant resolution is going to fail immediately due to a headache and trepidation about heading into another year in which terms like lateral flow, lockdown, and Boris Johnson are known to you.

Nevertheless, before the morning was over I'd sat at a desk with sheets of lined paper from a brand new jumbo sized Wilko pad.   I'd found a new cheap pen, bought in the Wilko sale.  And the first ink was shed.  It didn't begin well.  I stole the first sentence.  From Moses, as I once believed.  From the "E" authorship as I came to know.  Words many of us know in English and words I had to learn in Hebrew although the pronunciation we learned in college would take any Hebrew speaker past horror into laughs of derision.

We wrote today. We also walked to the nearby marina
for the first time since falling seven weeks ago.
Our knees now hate us!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  I'm not so ambitious and aim to create words, melded into phrases, sentences and some kind of coherence.  It's an experiment after a year of not writing, of despondency and even a hatred, for a while, of all that went before.

The words dried.  The flow became barren and the story became unwritten as a new tale arose that I could no longer write, that my words were without merit, without grace, turgid turpentine extrusions that deserved no aspiration to redemption or appreciation.

Stories are stories.  The legend of the silent pen.  The fable of self rejection.  The saga of worthlessness in the time of illness.  I believed the head flood would never again reach paper, could never be curves and lines on a page.  All would have been purged, burned away, had I not been stopped.

Yet here I am, watching the encroaching clouds on New Year's Day while Radio Three continues to play the music of Christmas.  Today I will not express the music of the new or the variations in a symphonic sky.  Today I will only begin, like God but smaller.  The stories tell of how he wrote stories.  I am more real yet hope only to write microcosms.

Perhaps it doesn't matter.  Jesus wrote only some unknown words in the dust.  Or so another story related.  He did not need to write and we must wonder what is story and what is history.  Could he write at all or was he, like all of his artisan craftsman class, illiterate?

So writing is not to be burden.  It's not to be in my personal, secular decalogue:

Rule six:  Thou shalt write.  Thou shalt produce three pages every morning even though your hand hurts already at the top of page two and your handwriting has deteriorated to a near illegible scrawl through a year of believing a lie and only using a pen to add letters to crosswords and numbers to sudoku or to record the walks you can't currently do.

Rule seven: Write shorter rules.

Writing then is to be free.  Sit and see what happens.  Will the words flow again?  Yes they will but words are like the sea, washing in tides.  Or like the moon, waxing and waning.  Can we remain the full moon?  Some claim we can and write for hours every day whether their head pours out extravagance or not.

For me, I will write today, meandering on the beginning.  It's a matter of simplicity not of the scholar.  Learning about God and creation in Hebrew won't help you create.  It might be interesting.  Or it may just be frustrating as it was for me.  I was ill for weeks and dropped too far behind in parsing verbs to catch up.  Creation is not a matter of academia.  Even the local masters degree in creative writing is not creation.

Creation is from within each of us.  I believe that.  We are born to be creative.  Not necessarily in words or colours or by chipping away stone into new forms.  Creation builds communities as well as novellas.  In theological terms we are all called to be co-creators with God.  All of us can metaphorically say "Let there be light" and create light.

Not that I "believe in God" as the term is mostly understood.  I'm atheist.  Or non-theist.  Or something.  Perhaps the old myths and legends still have meaning.  If I can see that morals in Aesop or appreciate the old Stoics whose metaphysical and supernatural beliefs are shared by nobody today then why shouldn't I draw meaning from those Biblical sagas I got to know so well when I was firm in the narrowest theism?

So in the beginning, God created ...

You and I hold divinity within us - however you take that word.  I'm going to define God now.  A partial, movable definition.  A beginning of definition, perhaps that start of a creed that can change with days, years and knowledge and which could never be read by millions each day, centuries after it becomes unreasonable.

A definition:  God is that which creates.

So as far as you create you are being God.  Or if that offends your theism you are doing the work of God.  And as far as you give others the space to create you are creating space for God to exist in the world.

On any day, not just New Year's Day, you can form an intention:  "In the beginning I will create, or participate in creating the heavens and the earth."

The dreamers of the James Webb Telescope are being God.  Greta Thunberg and all who stand for life and ecological harmony are being God.  The novelist and painter both express that divinity.  The food bank volunteers create hope and express other aspects of my unwritten creed too.   All of us can be co-creators.

And that, for myself, is something I often forgot last year.  I lost sight of my own calling to be that which is God.  Co-creator.  Lover.  Doer of good.  Student of compassion to others and to myself.  But mostly I simply rejected that I too held the Holy Spirit of Creation.

Three pages.  Complete.  A beginning.