"Write what is in the Heart"

A shore of thin reeds in light winda tall boat alone at nightstars hand over the barren landthe moon rises out of the Yangtzehow could writing ever lead to fameI quit my post due to illness and agedrifting along what am I likea solitary gull between Heaven and Earth¹Du Fu

(712-770)

The Chinese poet Du Fu wrote this poem in the summer of 765 CE, when he had to relocate his family and search for a new post. Traveling on a tall-masted boat along the Yangtze, he wished he had achieved fame for something other than writing, for poets received no royalties. Yet it was for his poetry that Du Fu was remembered and revered for over a thousand years. Hailed as the "Saint of Poetry," Du Fu is one of the best-known Chinese poets, whose work has been memorized by the young and the old throughout the centuries. The site of Du Fu's modest thatched cottage, built when he was exiled to Chengdu in Western part of China, became one of the shrines of Chinese literature. Poetry has a very special place in Chinese culture; the Chinese word for poetry, shi, means "language of the heart." As Bill Porter, who translates many Chinese poems into English, notes: "No social or ritual occasion, no political or personal event was considered complete without a few well-chosen words in rhyme that summarized the subtleties of the Chinese vision of reality and that linked this vision with the beat of their hearts."² In Du Fu's poetry, we can see the poet's discerning eye for details of the social trauma of war and famine, and the poet's heart pulsating with empathy and compassion for the suffering masses.

Many Chinese poems have only five or seven characters in one verse. Each single character must be deftly chosen not only for its meaning but also for its sound and tonal quality. In traditional China, children began to memorize a lot of poetry and literature at a tender age in order to acquire a wide repertory of images, metaphors, tropes, and idiomatic expressions. Writing Chinese well takes much practice and study, for one needs to be familiar with Chinese literary genre, rhetoric, themes, and aesthetics. Through prolonged study and modeling after the great literary masters, one acquires the linguistic skills and poetic sensibility to capture transient feelings and fleeting moments. As in Du Fu's poem, delicate feelings of the human heart are often alluded to by sensory description of natural scenery, which evokes different moods and sentiments.

Writing becomes a spiritual practice when one uses it as a means not only to communicate thought and feelings, but also to reflect on one's life and bare one's soul. Augustine was in his forties, serving as a bishop, when he penned the classic Confessions. Looking back at his youthful indiscretions, fantasies, and desires with introspection, Augustine sought to establish a more intimate relation with God. While suffering from psychic stress and illnesses, the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen struggled to record what she saw and heard in her visions, even though words often failed to catch up with her fecund imagination. She wrote, "But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses . . . I set my hand to the writing."³

In our modern day, Henri Nouwen's broken relationship with his friend Nathan led to a period of deep depression and spiritual crisis. His "secret" journal, later published as The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom, recorded an intense period of self-doubt, loneliness, and melancholy: "I had come face to face with my own nothingness. It was as if all that had given my life meaning was pulled away and I...