Fly free my friend, fly free

A hawk story, and a life in books (+ a celebratory GIVEAWAY!)

There was a hawk on my path today. It is the third time I have seen it this week, and I’m sure it’s the same one, always circling the same place. It arrived as a long shadow cast over my left shoulder, and as I looked up to see it turn towards the tree line, time folded in on itself and I was back there, in Costa Rica all those years ago, trying and failing to write a book.

Of course there is a hawk¹ on my path today. It is the eighth anniversary of the publication of the book I was struggling to write back then, my first book Freedom Seeker. The one that set me free.

Talons. Wings. Circles. Flight paths. Control. Surrender. These words are riding the thermals as I remember the other hawk story, and measure in wingspans the trajectory that it shifted.

I’d like to share that story today, on this anniversary, and ask you a question. I have a lovely celebratory giveaway for you at the end too, but first, some thoughts on nature, authenticity and control.

The Dáodéjīng (sometimes written Tao Te Ching), or The Way and its Power, is a poetic and powerful compilation of wisdom, which has become the most translated of all philosophical work in Chinese. Dating back to around 300BCE, it is traditionally attributed to a figure known as Laozi (sometimes written Lao Tzu), although it is likely to have had a long gestation in different hands.

Its mystical nature has generated a host of interpretations, but all centre on the notion of wú wéi, conventionally translated from the Chinese as ‘non-action’. This is not passivity, but rather letting things take their natural course, embracing spontaneity and not endeavouring to control things. It means having your mind perfectly attuned to an activity or situation so that no conscious effort is needed to accomplish it.

There are also frequent references to the natural world, reminding us that birds are not always in flight and the skies do not always storm. In some ways it is an ode to zìrán, the Chinese term for naturalness, or embracing things as they are.

The Dáodéjīng also emphasises de which translates from the Chinese as ‘power’ or ‘virtue’, not in the moral sense but rather as a property inherent in something². This is sometimes described as ‘authenticity’ or ‘skill at living’.

This is the wisdom of listening, practising and trusting without trying to force outcomes.

In recent years I have discovered that this is also the wisdom of fearless writing. I absolutely did not know that when I was writing Freedom Seeker.

This approach is not easy for anyone brought up in a results-driven society. We want to be famous already. We want assurances that what we write will be good so that we don’t waste our time. We want perfect sentences to come out and we get frustrated when they don’t. We have a fixed idea about what kind of writer we should be, and what we should write about, and we hold tightly to that. But what if we could see that in doing all this we are fighting against the current when we could just as easily flow with it? What if, instead, we simply follow our curiosity and intuition, and go wherever our hearts want to go? What if we could just write, or create, or do what we love to do, simply because we love it?

If you have read Freedom Seeker – which was published eight years ago today, on my wedding anniversary, just a few weeks before my fortieth birthday – you might remember that it began, as many stories do, with a meltdown on my bedroom floor.

I was a heavily pregnant workaholic small-business owner with a toddler and a head full of noise. That particular day I was supposed to go to London to talk on a panel about whether ‘do what you love’ was good advice. As the founder of a company called Do What You Love, you can imagine which side of the argument I was on, except that I was stressed and exhausted, and not a great advert for what I believed in. I was regretting accepting the invitation. And then I went to get dressed and couldn’t do up my jeans. It’s the mouse that sinks the boat.

As I lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling wondering what had happened to my life, I had a flashback of riding up a mountain path on horseback to Paro Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest monastery, after a surprise dinner with the Prince of Bhutan. It felt like a dream, so far was that moment from my daily life now. I watched myself standing alone, inhaling silence at the edge of the mountain as a gentle mist tumbled over the rice paddies of the Paro Valley 3,000 feet below.

The flashback was enough to make me see that I had once known freedom, but in recent years I had trapped myself by chasing a specific and unhealthy idea of success. I dragged myself up and went outside to stand barefoot in a patch of afternoon sun. As I breathed deeply, I felt a space open up.

I went back indoors and rummaged in my desk for a notebook, determined to start journaling again. Emptying my head onto its pages over the next few weeks brought some clarity, and I booked five months off for maternity leave.

My sweet baby (now nine!) arrived in July, and I spent the summer carrying her up and down Brighton seafront pondering what it takes to feel free. It felt like a big enough question for a book. I decided to put a proposal together and things moved faster than I expected. I landed an agent and a book deal before returning to work. But that’s when the trouble began. I spent far too long fiddling around with the structure of the book on an Excel spreadsheet, moving chapters back and forth, switching the location of ideas and renaming sections without actually writing anything.

One day, a few months in, Mr K glanced at my laptop screen and hastily rearranged his furrowed brow. ‘Are you still working on that? Shouldn’t you be writing something by now?’ I was devastated. He had found me out. I had no idea how to write a book. I was terrified of the whole project. I was scared of sharing my stories, but even more than that, I was scared of the fact that I had no idea how to get those stories out of my head and onto the page. ‘I give up. It isn’t working. I need a miracle to get this done.’

Mr K looked at me and said, ‘I think you need to get away for a while.’ Before I could protest about the time or the expense, he had booked me on a flight to Costa Rica. I travelled to Nosara via an old friend’s sea-fishing lodge in Paquera. By the time I arrived at the hotel I was still clueless about how I was going to get the book written, but I was beginning to trust that it would work out. I had surrendered all notions of trying to control what the book would become, or how my career would take shape as a result. I was just there, ready to write, waiting to see.

At breakfast the duty manager sat down next to me and said, ‘The strangest thing has happened. Those people over there are leaving today, and we have had a string of cancellations. You are going to have the whole place to yourself for the rest of the week. Why don’t we put a table in the middle of the yoga rancho so that you can see the ocean as you write?’

They brought me Costa Rican coffee and put fresh flowers on the table, and I danced with howler monkeys as Xavier Rudd’s Follow The Sun rolled across the jungle. As sunset approached the hotel staff moved my desk to the side of the rancho to make space for their regular kundalini yoga class, held for locals. Joining in, I rolled out my mat, unaware that I was about to have an experience that would change my writing life.

The circular rancho had a vast conical roof, held up by individual tree trunks that framed the jungle beyond. Hummingbirds were flitting through the trees. In the class we were doing a simple pose, our hands pressed together above our heads, first fingers pointing upwards. ‘Reach for your life,’ called our teacher, Angie, unaware of the potency of her words. As I stretched up I felt myself crack open. Out of the corner of my eye I sensed something moving. A bird of prey was flying over the Pacific, now swooping, now soaring. The black hawk-eagle spread her wings further, catching the soft breeze and gliding over the jungle. She moved closer, silhouetted against the setting sun.

I looked up to see the bird heading straight for us. At the last possible moment she swooshed right past the yoga shala, and in that second I was electrified, as if her spirit had leapt from her body right into my soul. For a split second everything went white. Fire shot up my spine and tears streamed down my face. And then I knew. The formlessness of freedom had taken the form of the bird, which transferred a formless sense of freedom in me, soon to shape-shift once more into the form of words on the page. Having written nothing for four months, I wrote 30,000 words in the next four days, and I haven’t stopped writing since.

A lot can happen in eight years.

Life is better together - with words, and with other like-hearted people

Today is not just the eighth anniversary of the publication of my first book Freedom Seeker. It is also the first anniversary of my sixth and latest book Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived³ (as well as our wedding anniversary!)

Kokoro was my companion through grief, and writing it – and doing the living I had to do to get it written – was one of the toughest experiences of my life. But I could not be more grateful for having done it. Physically, metaphorically, spiritually, it led me up mountains, and at the top of one of them – Gassan, the mountain of death, a beautiful mountain in a remote northern part of Japan – I had a revelation that forever changed the way I see the world. That, to me, is what a life in books means. It is a life filled with questions, and the search for answers, and the people we meet along the way.

Writing (and reading) books is a permission slip to ponder life’s enigmas and an invitation to cultivate enough patience to wait for the answers. It’s the deep joy of witnessing ideas take shape, of crafting each sentence, and braiding words together into something which sometimes reaches in and lodges in a reader’s heart to be carried through the world by them. And a life in books has also led to some of my most precious friendships and writerly connections here online, especially in my private writing community SoulCircle.

After Kokoro was published I decided to take a year off writing books, having had six published in as nearly many years. I needed to step out of the hermitage and into the sun once more. I craved connection, and a close community. This past year I have poured my energy into creating SoulCircle, which has blossomed into the most beautiful collection of souls spilling what is in their heads and hearts on to the page and learning to bravely share it. Knowing what a life in books has brought me this past eight years, I would love to take this opportunity to invite to join. To me, anyone who writes is a writer. Anyone who spills what is in their head and heart onto the page is a writer. Anyone who takes this experience of being human and expresses it in words is a writer. So you too, my friend, are a writer, and you belong.

A special invitation for you

Today, on this triple anniversary - celebrating freedom and living well and love! – I have a special giveaway and important question for you (coming up) and also I would like to extend that invitation to you to take your place in SoulCircle.

Every penny of every SoulCircle subscription* goes towards creating resources to support writers like you and me, people wanting to explore this life in words⁴, and it is for this reason that I am able to offer extraordinary value for year-round inspiration including:

• Journal Notes from me with inspiration for your own writing (every single week)

• Beautiful deep dive Live Writing Circles, which often lead to unexpected, wild and potent writing (at least eight times per year)

• Ask-me-Anything Q&A/mentoring including topics such as publishing and writing on Substack (quarterly)

• A private chat space to connect with me and other writers (open all year round)

• Free access to my mini classes How to Get a Book Deal and Write for Love Write for Money (writing on Substack)

• PLUS a host of new resources coming soon, including guest writing workshops and live write-together sessions, and How to Use Scrivener to organise projects such as book proposals, manuscripts, podcasts and e-courses.

All of this has a value of well over £600 per year, but it is available for a fraction of that thanks to the reinvestment of ALL subscriptions to support the creation of these resources. In celebration of my bookiversaries and to encourage you to commit to your own creativity in the year ahead, I invite you to come and join us in SoulCircle today, and be part of something amazing.

That black hawk-eagle encounter in Costa Rica became the moment after which everything about my writing life was different. Perhaps joining SoulCircle will be that moment for you.

We don’t need to get on a plane to see the great mystery of this world, or find a sense of belonging. We just have to open our minds and hearts, and our notebooks – and write. And having a beautiful community of other writers to support us, and a guide to encourage you forward, makes all the difference. Join now!

To join just upgrade to paid on Substack or go to https://bethkempton.substack.com/subscribe and choose Monthly to try it out or Annual to get a big discount and make a solid commitment to your writing.

A few thoughts on freedom seeking

Eight years on from Freedom Seeker and I have so much more freedom now than I even dreamt of back then, and SO much of it is thanks to, and because of, writing. Also so much of the joy in my life is connected, in one way or another, to writing, reading, and the people who do both alongside me. I hope you will come and join us, for less than the price of a coffee and a slice of cake each month, and watch your writing life transform before your eyes and see yourself take flight on the wings of your commitment.

And now, before I ask YOU a big question, I’d like to offer a few words from Freedom Seeker, the book which changed everything for me and led me onto this book writing path and into the world of creative souls doing what they love even when the world seems to conspire against them.

When you feel a stirring or a longing or a discontent, if you feel things closing in again, the colour seeping out, the shadows moving in, you know what to do. It may well happen, but now all you need to do is make sure you don’t get caged again. Don't go back to your default mode of operation. Keep this book on your desk or by your bed and refer to it before the bars return. Reach out. Check in. Do anything. Do something.

Remember, the good and the bad all passes, so experience all that is happening in the knowledge that it won’t last forever. Be grateful for the beauty and breathe through the pain. Keep on going, keep on flying, for that's where freedom lies.

Freedom seeking is a lifelong quest. It's an ongoing journey of awakening to what really matters, in the beauty and the dust. To what we can do, and to what we must.

This is your life. You get to choose whether you live more and worry less. Whether you do what you love. Whether you stay committed to your path and to experiencing your life as your authentic self.

You get to choose who you fly with, or whether you fly alone. You get to choose how you spend your days and all the moments of those days.

This promise is unconditional. You can choose to feel free come rain or sun, hail or sleet. Come calm days or stormy days. Through the tough and the turbulence, the rapture and the rebirth.

Life is wild and glorious and hard and beautiful. We Freedom Seekers must keep choosing freedom with every decision, every detail, every dollar, every day. Because it's the experience of it all that adds up to a meaningful life.

Go now and live it with all that you've got.

Fly free my friend, fly free.

A QUESTION FOR YOU: What were you doing eight years ago today (or around this time) and what has shifted since? What do you hope might be true for you eight years from now?

Photo credits: Berlynn (first image), Neil Shaw (third image), Beth Kempton (last image), Holly Bobbins (all other images)

1. It is very likely that the bird that has been circling my path this week is in fact a buzzard. I just like the word hawk, and apparently many birds commonly referred to as hawks in the US are actually buzzards, so I have used a little poetic licence.

2. I do not speak Chinese and thus am grateful for the advice of Don Starr, Director of Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University for advice regarding the Dáodéjīng.

3. Kokoro

4. This refers to all SoulCircle subscriptions after the unavoidable Substack and Stripe fees go towards creating resources to support writers.