Tina Welling - Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature

Writing Wild brims with truths about living and writing and provides an invitation to live wild before we write. Tina Welling shatters conventional separations between mind and spirit, between the living and those who breathe but have forgotten how to live. She invites us back to nature and to remember what the species has forgotten.

Gerry Spence, trial lawyer and author of Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom

Tina Welling teaches writers the most important lesson of all: how to pay attention. Writing Wild is a heartfelt book about learning the rules of creativity from nature and how to be alert through our five senses to this wild and beautiful world. This book is inspiring and valuable not only to writers but to all creative people.

Barbara Abercrombie, author of A Year of Writing Dangerously

I know Tina Welling and have taught with Tina Welling, and I can think of no better person to trust a writers education to than Tina. Writing Wild will be a welcome addition to any writers library, a book that explores the natural world and its relation to the writing life.

Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire mysteries, the basis of A&Es hit series Longmire

Tina Welling shows us how openhearted attention to the natural world can take us beyond simple observation into a creative partnership with our surroundings. She takes us to a place where stories speak themselves and whisper reassuring truths, and then shows us how to use them in our own stories. Whatever you write, this book can make it better.

Jeremy Schmidt, author of Grand Canyon: The Life and Times of a Natural Treasure

Writing Wild succeeds on a spiritual as well as practical level at connecting the head and the heart. By integrating these words, in all their simplicity and depth, an aspiring writer and lover of nature will arrive at a place well beyond their expectations.

Broughton Coburn, author of The Vast Unknown: Americas First Ascent of Everest

Before I was a full chapter into Tina Wellings book, I found myself breathing more deeply; by , Id made a list of people I wanted to give Writing Wild to. What a gentle guide and rich companion for explorations of our wilderness both inside and out.

Judy Reeves, author of A Writers Book of Days

These days we think wild equates with unruly violence, when really it means experiencing life from the right brain and body, via direct knowing and intuition a skill so many of us have lost. Tina Welling connects you with a renewed wildness, a wide-eyed freshness that will gently focus your attention on the presence inside everything. This book will help you learn how to really see and come more fully alive. I love it!

Penney Peirce, author of The Intuitive Way, Frequency, and Leap of Perception

This book is as delightful as it is thoughtful. Spend a day with Tina Welling in the woods and feel your writers heart burst open on the page. Tina has created a process in which you can learn easily to awaken and align your nature soul with your writers soul, bringing greater richness and depth to both. This book will be a treasured companion of mine for a long, long time.

Susan Chernak McElroy, author of Animals as Teachers and Healers

Cowboys Never Cry

Crybaby Ranch

Fairy Tale Blues

Copyright 2014 by Tina Welling

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Excerpts from Writing Wild have been published in a different form in the following magazines or syndicates: Shambhala Sun, Writers on the Range, Teton Home and Living, Body & Soul, Natural Health, New Age, and The Writer.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welling, Tina.

Writing wild : forming a creative partnership with nature / Tina Welling.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60868-286-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-60868-287-4 (ebook)

1. Authorship. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Nature I. Title.

PN153.W43 2014

First printing, May 2014

ISBN 978-1-60868-286-7

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my sister,
Gayle Caston,
with love

ONE SUMMER DAY, I hiked Josies Ridge on Snow King Mountain. Large clouds moved across the sky and periodically put a lid over the sun. I paused to catch my breath from the upslope climb and gazed around the shadowy forest of tall, lanky pines. My glance caught on a fully rounded tree, leafless and apparently dead, standing upright with an abundance of sweeping limbs, making the tree stand out from others. At that moment, the sun broke through the cloud cover, and as I stood there, a dense, dew-beaded spiderweb, lacing the branches top to bottom, was abruptly illuminated.

One moment, the dead tree was notable only for its shapely flare, unusual in a harsh, high-altitude environment. The next moment, it was aflame with stars. My throat tightened, and tears stung my eyes. The forest was silent, I was alone, and the tree spangled before me, woven with fairy lights. Then the clouds closed over the sun again, and the sparkle was gone.

I stood in those shadowy woods looking at the bare tree, and my mind experienced a gracious leap. Skipping over the small steps of understanding, I knew suddenly that there was an interconnectedness between the earths creative energy and my own personal creative energy.

Writing Wild was conceived right then. I wanted to understand more about this connectedness. I wanted to explore those small intuitive steps of knowing to lay them out one by one, untangle the workings of that connection, and learn how to use this natural resource.

In our daily lives, you and I may be unaware that everything we know about creating, we know intuitively from the natural world. Yet when the light shines just right, we sense that we are part of the whole energy system of the universe, poised endlessly to express itself.

Writing Wild is based on the ancient universal law As above, so below, which tells us we can understand the patterns of the higher by following the patterns of the lower, and vice versa. In the case of writing, by following the patterns of the earths creative energy, we can understand our own personal creative energy. Though the interconnectedness of ourselves and the natural world shimmers like the spiders web in sunlight, at times it can be so subtle that, not seeing it at all, we walk right into it, the supple strands clinging to our face and fingers. When the light shines directly on the web of connectedness, I think to myself, Why write this book? Everybody sees this web sparkling like an earthbound constellation. But other times, when the web disappears before my eyes, I realize that as a creative person, I am often floundering, feeling a lack of support and guidance, unaware I am entangled in my own safety net.