Writing for Self-Discovery: An Invitation to an Ensouled Life
Let your writing be a root system.
In 2019, I hosted a four-week writing class at The Roadside Attraction Art Gallery, where Bruce Carleton and Doug O. Smith, graciously opened up their space to host a group of writers who gathered to "Writing an Ensouled Life."
Here is an updated essay I shared with the writers:
Digital Image: Layered and manipulated original photos by B. Littleton
There’s a quiet truth many of us sense but few are ever taught: that the soul doesn’t rise, it deepens. And real growth, the kind that returns us to ourselves, isn’t about climbing ladders of success or collecting medals of enlightenment. It’s about learning how to descend, how to grow down.
James Hillman called this the soul’s requirement, and Jung confessed it took him a thousand ladders down just to reach the “little clod of earth” that he was. I love that image. Humble, earthy, real. Not some shiny spiritual peak, but dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of wisdom. A full-bodied belonging to this human life.
And here’s the thing: if we don’t consciously choose this path of descent, it often finds us anyway. Through illness, heartbreak, a deep weariness we can’t quite explain. Through loss, betrayal, or just the slow ache of not feeling alive in our own lives. The ornaments of identity lose their shimmer, and suddenly all the things we were told would make us whole no longer hold their promise. We’re left in the dark, and it’s there, strangely and beautifully, that the Soul begins to speak.
Writing, when done honestly, can be one of the ways we meet ourselves in that darkness. Not to escape it, but to befriend it. To listen closely. To follow the feeling in the body down to the roots. To stop pretending, stop performing, and just be with what’s real.
In this sacred descent, we don’t write to impress. We write to belong. To ourselves, to the moment, to the mystery that pulses through both. We write not as experts, but as pilgrims. Not to become more, but to become real.
This is the work of the ensouled life. It’s messy and holy and sometimes lonely, but it’s never meaningless. The dirt we so often avoid is where the gold waits. The embodied soul. The root system of who we really are.
There is a legitimacy to sorrow, to confusion, to pausing in the middle of the road and asking, “What now?” The world might not reward that kind of inquiry, but the Soul does. In fact, it’s often how it gets our attention in the first place. As R.A. Falconer writes, there’s a grace in letting the old images fall away. "There is medicine in the mud."
So go out under the moon tonight. Let the trance dissolve. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are stitched from stars and soil, and the longing you feel is holy. Breathe into the night sky and feel her breath back. This is relationship. This is being known.
And in those moments when it all falls apart again, may you remember: this is not failure, but the sacred rhythm of rotatio, the soul’s spiraling journey of death and rebirth. Fantasy, dream, play, grief. They all have a place in your story.
As Annie Dillard reminded us, don’t spend your days sulking on the edge of grace, wondering if you deserved it. Get in there. Squeak into a gap in the soil. Raise Lazarus. Make whoopee. Spend the afternoon. Spend your life.
Let your writing be a root system.
Let it help you remember what’s been buried, what’s been aching to bloom. The Soul doesn’t care if you’re polished. The Soul cares if you’re listening.
So let’s begin.
Let’s write from that place. The one beneath the performance, beneath the striving. The one that knows we are already held.
Not to be more.
But to be here.
To be human.
To be home.
Narrative Essay by Brenda Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025
Digital Image: Layered and manipulated original photos by B. Littleton