focusing for writers, Part I

Authors of fiction and depth psychologists share a common experience: when figures from the imagination show up, it is one of the great moments in the creative process. It is “a close encounter of the soul kind,” says Barbara Kirksey in Facing the Gods (1980, p. 101).

Part awakening, part recognition, offering the possibility of profound relationship, the figure brings a writer’s ideas into focus. Though we are perhaps discovering that figure for the first time, the awakening often engenders a rediscovery and reevaluation, even perhaps a reuse, of previous thoughts. It is like discovering a box of old clothes in the back of the closet that awakens good memories, tearing the material into strips, and lovingly braiding them into a circular rug for the hearth. Everything is there, nothing wasted, and yet it has been transformed.

You may wonder how the particular image of braiding a rug came to me. I have not seen a braided rug in decades, though I remember one from my childhood: store-bought and manufactured, not hand-made.  I did not know I would use this image as I began my reflections on Hestia, but a close encounter of the soul kind with her, one who is everywhere and yet oddly overlooked, has moved me. The braided rug feels like Hestia to me: circular, warm, near the hearth, age-softened, sturdy, and welcoming. I can imagine sitting silently by a fire, absorbed in the rug’s subtle play of texture and color as the long cloth braid circumambulates the central point. The quiet focus would evoke and honor Hestia, a goddess of centeredness.

Hestia “was worshipped at the center of the city and the center of the Greek household, and who was presented as a heap of glowing charcoal which became the omphalos (navel) at Delphi, the Greek center of the world” (Kirksey 1980, p. 102).

There are no images of Hestia, very few stories, and rarely is she paired with another god. Yet in the “Homeric Hymn to Hestia” (Boer 1970, p. 140), the singer tells us that she receives the highest honor of all the gods because she is present in every home.

Hestia,
You who have received the highest honor
to have your seat forever
in the enormous houses of all the gods
and all the men who walk on the earth,
it is a beautiful gift you have received
it is a beautiful honor.
Without you, mankind would have no feasts,
since no one could begin the first and last drink
of honey-like wine without an offering
to Hestia.

Hestia, simply, is the hearth. So perhaps it is Hestia, who I have come to love in a deeper way, with me now even as I write, who offered the image of the braided rug in front of the fire. I think she would enjoy the feeling of bare toes on soft cloth illumed by firelight. I would enjoy sitting by her in such a moment.

Let us imagine sitting by a circle of glowing coals, the banked fire deeply quiet. Then Hestia is an ideal companion, an inspiration to authors circling around a topic again and again, seeking the center of their work, glimpsing those points of illumination that will shine through the prose. I find Hestia a very poignant companion for something my students often experience, which is feeling off-center, unable to settle down into their topic, wandering away and back, or simply wandering away entirely. And I wonder, have they befriended Hestia? Is there a way that invoking this neglected goddess can be a kind of medicine for the writer, gently homing them in their work?

Hestia is a divinity of space and special organization. She is an image of centeredness as comfort, balance, feeling at ease, or at home in mind, body, and soul, and she is an image of creating such spaces for ourselves.  A surfeit of Hestia helps us to dwell in a soulful way, just as an absence of Hestia may render us a bit like the wandering Odysseus, who aches for home but cannot seem to find how to get there, not for a very, very long time.

If we cannot find our way home in our writing, is this not a soul condition? Does this not manifest an aspect of our soul? How might wandering writers befriend Hestia to dwell with their topic and stay centered in their journey, no matter how eccentric or erratic the path?

We shall take up these questions in Part II….

References

Boer, C., Trans. (1970). The Homeric hymns. Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press.

Kirksey, B. (1980). Hestia, goddess of the hearth. In Facing the Gods. Irving, TX: Spring Publications, pp. 101-113.