I’m supposed to be editing my mini-book. I’ve blocked off the time to do it this afternoon. But I’ve just read a spiritual magazine for the first time in ages, and I can’t help but be unsettled by it. It’s a magazine focused on books and publishing in the esoteric and spiritual industry, too. That’s why I’ve chosen it to claim my attention while I eat my lunch in the burning late summer sunshine. 

The first piece I read is a poem. With, perhaps, some heart and soul – but little craft. A collection of phrases with gently guiding invitations to turn within and ‘quieten the mind’, as a panacea for all that’s demanding our deep integration in these times. There’s a subtly lilting rhythm and soft end-rhyming in the couplets that are lineated, but which together serve to create one single narrative sentence. One idea. One remedy. One meaning. 

And as I flick through the pages, reading what catches my eye, it’s this single-perspective focus that jars the most within me – story after story, feature after feature. Complexities presented as simple stories, opinions disguised as facts, nuances brushed over for the relative semblance of ‘truth’.

Moving further into the magazine, I begin with the Editor’s Note, but have to stop reading it through sheer boredom and utter disbelief at the unimaginative vapidity of the language here: “Welcome to this captivating issue, bursting with spiritual wisdom that will transport you on a transformative journey.” My italics. Couldn’t you say that about every issue of a spiritual magazine? Does it tell us anything substantial about the contents of this particular edition? No. Except as an early warning sign as to the kinds of writing we can expect throughout. 

I notice, disappointingly, that the both the editorial team and the contributing writers seem to be overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. Not all. But the majority when taken together. And I’m astounded, yet sadly unsurprised. 

Three articles in, and I begin to realise that what I’m noticing is actually a style feature of the magazine itself. The need for simplicity and directness in language, without nuance and complexity, to present the facts and the stories as clearly and accessibly as possible. I’m all for accessibility and clarity. Sometimes my own writing lacks it. But at the expense of nuance and complexity, those qualities can present dangerously over-simplified narratives where care and consideration are most required. 

Reading an article that holds my attention, Britain’s Magical History by Rob Wildwood, I can both appreciate the sweep of historical knowledge that’s presented here – giving me key pieces of information that serve in some ways to fill in the gaps in my own understanding of Britain’s ancient past – and flinch at the ways language is still used to simplify and reduce history to bitesized facts on a timeline, and to separate and categorise between peoples. “[S]avage invaders.” “Warlords like Arthur”. The peoples, and the lineages, presented here – predictably – feel hyper-masculine, patriarchal, war-like. Wildwood makes no mention of the ancient Grandmothers, such as Carolyn Hillyer (for example) evokes so poetically in her own writing and music, drawn deeply from her immersive kinship with the land. 

Wildwood’s concept of “History” here is a male-dominated and male-oriented story of facts and ages and kings and mages, but evokes in me no sense of real relationship with the land, or the stories, or the spirits he surveys. 

And it’s this. Again. This way that writing – especially for a wide, or perhaps “mainstream” audience – writing that requires sales in large numbers to help the publication survive, writing that resists deep listening and inner enquiry both with the subject it presents and with the medium (language) within which it is presented – this style of writing draws on the voices we’ve been taught to read. The voices that have held the authority, and dressed their opinions as facts, and iron-fisted the ways the world has been co-created, for too long. 

What do I mean?

I mean: the false projection of objectivity; the presentation of the author’s opinions as facts; the distance that’s created between the writer and the world when the writer is writing “about”, rather than “writing with”. This concept of “writing with” has been with me for a long time. For my PhD thesis and practice, I explored the process of writing with found text – singing with multiple voices to create a many layered text (meaning fabric, weaving, textile) that has no single point of origin or destination. No single meaning or interpretation. No “voice of God” that’s telling me what to think and how to relate to the world and subtly shaping the structure of my co-creation. It’s something I will continue to think with and write with as I deepen my exploration into Rewilding Writing.

And, I recognise also, that if I’m to write more and publish more in the world, to have my voice heard and find those who truly resonate with my work, this mode of writing is both something that I will have to be writing with and writing against. On the one hand, perhaps I’ll need to simplify my language and style to find publication in some of the more widely-read magazines and journals. I certainly wouldn’t turn down being published in this publication. On the other, I have no intention of compromising my ethics and integrity to do so. I think it’s one reason why I haven’t published widely up to now. But I know that the work I’m creating also demands to be seen, and I have to find a way to balance those conflicting edges that in some ways are only holding me back. 

But as I do begin to speak out more publicly, one thing I hope to contribute to is greater nuance, complexity, inclusion and diversity in spiritual writing and publishing. At the heart of my practice and my passion is my belief that the old structures so subtly encoded in writing and language are ripe for rebirth – and that we cannot shift the structure of our world if we do not shift the structure of our words. 

In my opinion, our contemporary English language is founded in separation and domination. For me, an ethics of spiritual wildness is an invitation to open to the depth of kinship that’s possible between both the human and the other-than-human entities who together co-create this experience we are living. 

The more I write, the more I trust in writing to show me the way. And the more I listen, the more I open to receive.