Haibun: Bread, Wine, and Writing

Earlier this week, I was writing in my “writing practice” notebook. The practice is something I pulled from Natalie Goldberg’s fantastic book, Writing Down The Bones. She suggests timed writing, by hand, and trying to fill a notebook a month. The key is to let the mind flow out through the pen and onto the page. I hope to fill half a notebook a month without my writing hand feeling like it will fall off.

This past week, as I wrote, outside my window was the shadow of the tree’s leaves being blown in the breeze. The leaves flickered back and forth as I started to describe them. As I remember it, I started to describe them as a million little pointer fingers and thumbs reaching for the communion wafers or crackers around the world, all in unison as they do across the globe on Sunday mornings. For some reason, I was seeing the world from the inside of a communion bowl as I watched the leaves and started writing.

Here’s the catch, I told myself (at Natalie Goldberg’s suggesting) that I wouldn’t read any of my entries for at least a month, so I’m working from memory. I am to read the notebook and listen to myself without judgement. So as I post about the peace I felt listening to the creek in the haiku, I am drawn to the peace I remembered after writing about communion. 

Around the my time in college when I put all my beliefs on the table, started deconstructing every religious belief I was raised to believe, communion was the one thing I could do fully if and when I went to church. For me, communion was fully an act of faith, really the only act of faith in a sea of deconstructible traditions. It was a piece of cracker or bread and juice or wine. All the meaning was infused into the elements and had to be believed to be practice. It was the symbol of the faith, it was the symbol of tradition: by faith we infuse the meaning to such a common food and drink. It was also practiced at every kind of church I went to, whether it was the gay affirming Episcopal Church or the more hetero-centric churches of my upbringing. I saw past the irony of it and, fully brought faith to it. Everything else was too loaded with assumed meaning to fit faith into it.

So I honored the process of the bread and wine as I do my writing practice. I don’t really know what I wrote, I just sit with the glimpses after it all happened.

the song of tranquil 
made by the trillion drops and
the rocks each spring