KILL YOUR DARLINGS

Kill your Darlings

The fastidious hold on what we create and our attachment to it. 

This could be a cloying sweetness, an over-polished gem, it could be a secret pain, a grudge or long held resentment, It could be our identity definition or alignment with any one way of being. It is I never and I always and I should. It could be our idealized self image- the perfect object of how we want to appear- or it could be the flip-side of that particular coin, the self we want no one to see. It could be a person in our life that walks over us time and again, it could be our addictions. It may be your catch phrase. 

What have you grown attached to- what feels held and precious? Like the Gollom character, what draws your eye away from the present alive moment and traps you in its shiny gaze?

Kill your Darlings, a phrase most commonly used to teach how to clarify and focus writing, is thought to have originated with William Faulkner. Needless to say I am not advocating for actually killing anything. Only to invite a deeper level of discernment, a clarity of harvesting what is essential and allowing what is not to compost. Trust me, I understand the emotional attachment we have to our darlings--- this is my work too! Yet I know there is freedom on the other side.

A POEM

Our perfect polished offerings.
Our overworked and over-attached presentation of self,
ideas, feelings.

We turn them in our palm and grow
deeply entranced and attached to their shine…
Forgetting the rough hand, so much more alive.

NOW this is important;
Your darlings are also your pain-
your hurts, shames and collected injustices.
All things become spellbinding
in our obsessive grip and gaze-

So once you know.
Once you feel its weight and timbre
have that moment of clarity-
AH this is what this is and
AH this no longer holds
True life

Extend your arm and let it fall.

A thing once created has already moved beyond
It’s original urge-
It’s longing to be-
Please
Never worry there is not more life to come.

Kill your darlings before they
Kill you, and
Make it clear
That you are not your polished gems
Your ripened fruit, or your hidden pain-

At least that is not all of it

You are the pulsing force that
Bears the fruit
You are the continuous current
That spills into form.

--August 12, 2021.