Knowing Your Yeats from Your Philpotts: Intellectual Integrity and the Fight Against Mis/Disinformation

This week, I have been planning a post about a lovely little quote about the universe and how it wants us to sharpen up our wits. It has one of my favorite words in it–magic–so you’d think I would use this line to invite you to find magic in the year to come.

Actually, no.

Instead, I was going to tell you all about how this sentence is mistakenly attributed to W.B.Yeats (all the time!), when, in reality, it was written by another 19th century white guy who you have never heard of.

I was going to tell you how even my university’s Irish Studies department slapped this quote under a photo of a young Willie Yeats on Instagram. I was considering telling you how I know my Yeats so well (thanks to that same department) that I was sure he wouldn’t say such a thing in such a way. I was going to tell you how all kinds of smart people don’t know their dead Irish poets and clearly haven’t done their research, because this misattribution has been propagating for years (and it has driven me crazy all along).  

But honestly, who cares? 

This obsessive need to nail the citations, button up all the grammar, and perfect the formatting is tiresome, don’t you think? The not-so-subtle self congratulatory nature of pointing out that I am a well-educated poetry geek who is smarter than a social media manager is kinda gross, isn’t it? And don’t we all have better things to worry about than the feelings of long dead dudes who were born in British colonies?

Before we go on, since I know you’re dying to know who said “The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper”: it was Eden Philpotts, an Indian born British writer who I only know about because of Wikipedia. I did track down the original source of the quote (because I am insufferable and enjoy procrastination techniques that involve using the search feature in PDFs of obscure manuscripts). I will never read A Shadow Passes, but I did read the entire paragraph on page 19 that includes the quote.

 Once again: so what? Ultimately, instead of sweating the small stuff, isn’t it more important to engage with the idea that the universe really is waiting for our wits to grow sharper so we can see all the magical things? I mean, research is all well and good, but what we really need is to see the world through the eyes of the soul and navigate according to our dreams, right?

Well, yes, of course!

And, well, not exactly.

In 2022, we need to know the difference between truth and belief (and it’s even more important than knowing your Yeats from your Philpotts)

We all know that we live in an age when “facts” seem debatable. It’s old news to hear that lots of the news is fake news. “Science” is a kickball and the arguments being waged over that word have nothing to do with peer review. And then there is truth, which means something different to nearly everyone, especially when you spell it with a capital “T.” 

That last example? Where “truth” becomes more a matter of personal conviction than the opposite of a verifiable lie? Yeah, I have been guilty of tossing that word around and helping to render it a little more meaningless. And I know I’m not the only writer/healer/transformation professional who is contributing to substituting “personal truth” when we really mean “belief.”

I think we can all get better about making those distinctions and continuing to ask questions and offer answers accordingly as we move forward.

So yeah… I am not writing that post because, in the grand scheme of things, mixing up a Nobel Prize winning poet and a minor author, both born in the 1860s, is a laughably minor offense. If anything, it shows the college professors and librarians their own enduring value, even with the world of knowledge available at the other end of a search string.

Here’s the real question: how do we tell the difference between the data we need to verify and the ideas we can share with impunity? 

Obviously, if it’s a matter of life and death, like public health or an attempted coup election security, we should verify our sources and proofread all the names, dates, and figures.

Oh, wait, it’s the 2020s. “Obviously” does not apply in such cases. At least it seems that many folks with microphones and social media platforms don’t think so as conspiracy and conjecture get passed along, emotionalized, and amplified.

I’m with you: I don’t know how to take on the disinformation, the endless arguments, the cognitive dissonance, the torrents of bad faith. 

All too often, I sit with the great lie we learned on the playground: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. I just get sucked into the constant questioning… Are we going to be OK or are we doomed? Are we treating a paper cut when the patient is in cardiac arrest? Are we all fighting over place settings while the kitchen is on fire?

As we all struggle with the most impossible social divides, let me stick to what I know today: literature, the construction of ideas, and the role of the creative. 

Remember, Anonymous Was a Woman

Ok, so the internet seems to recall that Virginia Woolf expressed this now iconic idea in A Room of One's Own. At least, we all agree to the snappier paraphrasing and appreciate that she said, "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

When we stop caring about who said what or we just accept the Instagrammable meme version of a quote or a statistic, we lose something. 

It may just be an Irish Studies department losing the respect of its alumni. We might lose some of our own intellectual integrity. After all, we would hope that when we say something quotable, draw something sharable, or create something meme-able, we get a shout out and a link to our Insta.

We might lose something even more valuable, if, for example, we believe or share unverified theories or outright lies about what really matters, like climate change, vaccine safety, insurrection mobs, or voter suppression figures.

What if we build out intellectual integrity by seeking proper attribution and getting the damn quote right?

‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.’

Those are actual lines from Yeats, from his poem “Tom O’Roughley.” I’ve long held this idea close to my heart because I hate to see “superior” knowledge used as a weapon. I think we all know what it’s like to be both the bird and the prey, and I think we recognize the suffering that comes to all in such situations.

We don’t need to get all nasty and pedantic in this quest to do better. Instead, in this age of mis- and disinformation, I invite you to join me and advocate for just a bit more intellectual integrity. 

It doesn’t have to mean jumping into the scrum on your cousin’s Facebook feed or calling out the wellness influencer you used to love who has started to call the Covid-19 vaccine a bioweapon. (But really, the vaccine is not a bioweapon and maybe more people need to hear that.)

You can begin this quest for integrity by looking a little deeper before you share a cool line from the Facebook feed or from that first page of result on those crazy quote directories.

Besides uncovering misattributions or realizing that the line really did have a source and wasn’t written by Anonymous, here’s what you may discover…

• The person who actually said this wonderful thing was/is a Nazi sympathizer, an abuser, a total creep. (Warning: you may uncover things you didn’t want to know. Coco Chanel, Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Gandhi all spring to mind immediately.)

• The context of the line “everyone” loves to quote makes a tremendous difference and reading the whole piece, or at least the rest of the paragraph may alter your decision to share that one line that caught your fancy

Getting Maya Angelou quotes right matters

Here’s one last story about my quote sleuthing hobby (and proof that I worked at a college library throughout my twenties and was learning the trade when I wasn’t in my office blogging about epiphanies).

There’s an oft-quoted line by the legendary Maya Angelou: "No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”

You’ve seen it. I promise. It’s used by brilliant, well-meaning people to brilliant effect all the time. I just came across it most recently in Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Here’s the slightly more complete version that is often shared only during Black History Month or articles specific to the Black experience: “For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” 

My gods, it is a powerful line and it does speak to the entire human experience, but everyone’s first favorite Black woman poet (besides Amanda Gorman) wasn’t talking about the journey of life, she was talking about the (forced) journey from her ancestors’ particular homeland. And that matters.

It takes some patience to actually find the source of this passage (which is always attributed to Angelou with the ellipses, but never actually names the source).  It’s an article from Section D, Page 15 of the New York Times from April 16, 1972. But, again, so what?

Well, I find it pretty damn revealing to note that the name of the piece is “For Years, We Hated Ourselves.”

Angelou is reviewing a four-part documentary series, “Black American Heritage,” by Eliot Elisofon, a white photographer who sounds like an utter egomaniac who also had a deep respect for the people and culture of Africa.

In the course of the review, Angelou gives us a glimpse of her own experience of being a Black American, who grew up learning how to act white and dread pagan Africa until the massive changes of the mid-1950s that inspired folks to ask “If Black is Beautiful, where has it been all this time?”

I encourage you to read the whole article and marvel that it was written fifty years ago, to sit with all that has changed, and to reckon with how few things are different.

Because, indeed, to paraphrase the great Maya Angelou in the hope of providing her words the context and respect they deserve, we cannot know where we are going unless we know exactly where we have been and exactly how we arrived at our present place.

And that is true in the deeply specific and personal, as well as the collective, universal relationship to this whole swath of human history, experience, and future.

We all have stories to tell…

What Story Is Mine to Tell Right Now?

Whenever I find myself spinning in circles and I have the urge to write,  I ask myself:

What story is mine to tell right now?

This is the essential question, whether my mind happens to be looping with anxiety or leaping with inspiration. 

(Have you noticed how they both tend to buzz at the same frequency? The nerves of worry and the nerviness of creativity are easily confused. When I ask this question, there’s a better chance of moving toward healing and productive cross pollination. That’s when the words finally start to flow.)

So Much To Say, So Hard to Find the Words

From my experience, “what story is mine to tell right now?” is the only place to begin when you feel the pressure to put words on the page and feel wordless at the very same time.

Here’s something we tend to forget when we’re overwhelmed and there is so much to say, either because the brain is swirling too fast with worry or soaring with new ideas: we writers can only set down one word at a time. 

“One word at a time” is the blessed miracle and the maddening flaw of language. 

We are forced to condense the immense and the ineffable into clusters of letters, limiting it all down to discrete, interconnected units of ideas. With time and focus, we spool a narrative. We can throw ourselves wide open to the expanse of sentences, stanzas, and stories. 

Here’s what might happen when you dare to ask, “what story is mine to tell right now?”

When I ask myself this question, I am almost always surprised. 

Sometimes, I need my journal and quiet hour. I must fill the page with rhetorical questions, nonsense sentences, and magnificent, revelatory errors of all kinds.

(When I wrote into this prompt yesterday, I definitely scrawled “when I know when I must right…” Cringe! But look what was revealed in that misspelling! Oh, my obsession with being correct, even on the uncensored pages of my own little green book)

Sometimes, the words take me to fairy glens and eighteenth century drawing rooms.

(Ok, so the novel got stalled in the transition between the endless 18-month summer and the uncertain fall, but there’s a book brewing, and it’s the story I was born to tell. When I give myself the freedom to describe a sacred well made of starlight and sphagnum moss or invent a whispered conversation between the countess and the peddler down the lane, I trust that I am making magic. You transform the very fabric of the world when you conjure and describe you own visions, stitch by stitch and word by word.)

Sometimes, the words come out seeking their place in the marketplace, issuing invitations to come play. 

(I’ll be the first to say that the “real writer” in me rolls her eyes at this naked display of capitalism, but then I remember that we live in a both/and universe. As the Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins says, “poetry doesn’t pay,” but the mortgage still comes due. And so, I ask my words, as they emerge one letter at time, to call in the writers, the healers, the dreamers, and the sovereignty seekers who will hear my song and use these ideas to add to their own. So, next time you see my images on Instagram, do read the captions, too. They’re lovingly crafted by a writer trusting the story that wants to be told.)

Sometimes the story is a text to a friend. Sometimes it’s an email to my grandpa. Sometimes it’s a note I stick in the lunch box in case second grade feels hard today. 

And sometimes the story that is mine to tell must be silently pounded into the pavement or held by the trunk of a beloved tree. Sometimes the story that is yours to tell is not yet speech ripe and will not come no matter how fine the pen, how quiet the room, how inspirational the view.

Trust the story. Trust the moment. Trust yourself.

The words will come in their own time, as they always do: one at a time, in a jumble or a flow. They will carry you onward to the story you must tell.

“What story is mine to tell right now?” is just one of many questions I pose to the dreamers, healers, and seekers who long to build a writing practice and birth their stories into the world.

In the Sovereign Writers’ Knot, the newest incarnation of my online writing community, you can find the the space, time, and company that will help you bring your words into the world.

We are welcoming new members through September 29. Learn more and apply now.

It's Time to Tell Stories That Are Rooted In the Earth

Last night, I helped my dad put together a slide presentation for his condo association. He’s passionate about bringing in solar power to fuel their community energy needs.

This past weekend, my husband and I looked out on our beloved backyard and wondered together about how we could make our family’s life more sustainable. We’re thinking about changing the way we buy and use electricity, how we can change our eating habits, and what food we can grow in the years to come.

As headlines about ecological catastrophe and systemic climate change vie with the latest Covid spikes and variants at the top of every newscast, these conversations seem inevitable and necessary. 

We all need to talk about our relationship with the land, with our resources, with survival, with creating a world where our children and their someday children can thrive.

Right now, I don’t know how to tell a story that isn’t rooted in the soil, soaked in the rain, singed by the fires, and aware of the climbing temperatures.

I may not be writing about the climate directly, but I find I am always in conversation with the Mother, with the Earth, with all the unseen interactions between humans and nature.

When we were visiting Maine last week, my aunt gave me three plants. 

A white sagebrush from my mother and a periwinkle from my grandmother that grew beside the houses on Cape Cod where I grew up. Both homes have since been sold. And then, a primrose that my great aunts grew on Prince Edward Island. That place is still in the family, but it’s not possible for us to cross the border to see the Canadian cousins right now.

Three plants from forbidden gardens, from patches of land that have become inaccessible for one reason or another. 

Three living beings that I can tend and touch, cultivated by beloved gardeners I can only visit in my memories.

Three delicate root systems I can protect and pray over, that (hopefully) will help me keep my family history alive.

How’s your relationship with the plants and soil that surround you?

I find myself wandering between my flower patches right now. I talk with the trees that have been here for decades longer than our house. I check on the perennials I have planted in my time here. I welcome these new plants and celebrating the bittersweet legacy of growth and change they represent.

This sense of finding solace and purpose amongst the blooms and blossoms is new to me. I’ve tried to make the place look pretty for the thirteen years we have lived here, but I usually tend to lose interest by August. Luckily, when September rolls around I can stick a new crop of mums in the ground to cover all the worn summer blossoms.

It’s different this year, however.

My new devotion to this rocky soil and the flowers I coax from the dry earth is inspired by my increasing awareness that our global environment is in trouble, surely. There’s something more to it, though. Something more personal and even more primal. 

It was my husband who helped me see another dimension of the story. During our conversation about the future of the planet and how we can be better citizens of Earth, I marveled at how my relationship with our nearly two acres of garden, lawn, and forest had deepened over time.

“Isn’t that part of becoming the crone?” he asked. “The wise woman?” (Why yes, that guy I married has read—most of—my book.)

I write about the way we’re princess, queen, and wise woman through life in The Sovereignty Knot, of course. I write about how the concerns of the queen shift to encompass the awareness of the wise woman. The story becomes most true as you live it, however.

As my girls grow older and my business matures, I find myself switching gears. I don’t have to engage in constant mothering and I’m finding I’m less concerned with being the in-control queen. At 42, though I certainly have lots of queen energy in my life (and princess energy too), I am consciously moving into the wise woman’s sense of being present and receptive, into the crone’s sense of conscious care and divine surrender.

This planet needs us all to step into our wisdom in new, beautiful, challenging ways.

We’re being called to live a bolder, wilder, more compassionate story. We need to focus on the plants outside our door as we think about the ecosystems that enable us all to breathe. We need to set down the old ways of being and open our arms wide to a new devotion to the world as-it-is.

We’re going to need to get more centered and more Sovereign than ever so we can make the choices that support the human and the non-human collective. 

As I’ve said before in many spaces, Sovereign is never meant to be a synonym for selfish. Instead, it’s an interconnected system of sovereign selves that can transform and heal this world.

Let’s be sovereign beings for the beautiful, burning sovereign world. One seed, one story, one wise act of creation at a time.

A Healer with a Pocketful of Wild Violets

It was a pretty rough one at the Goudy house. I had major dental surgery on Friday and my husband realized he had Lyme the night before. 

Suddenly, there were a million prescription bottles on the counter and someone was always asking “did you remember to take your antibiotics?” 

We were the walking wounded, though neither of us should have been walking anywhere. My husband is notoriously terrible at taking it easy, while I am rather skilled at shutting out the world and taking to my bed when I’m sick or need to recover from something as massive as a 2.5 hour tooth extraction. 

Nonetheless, we got through and we’re somewhat less pathetic now that it's Monday morning. (Though it’s still tough for me to talk for more than a few minutes. It's like my face is recovering from an ultramarathon I didn't train for.)

Fortunately, we had a healer on call

Seeing her parents weren’t themselves, our seven year-old took it upon herself to start making remedies. 

A neighbor, a consummate garden witch, had told our daughter that the little purple flowers that grew wild in the spring grass were edible.  

So Mairead scoured the yard (a marvelous collection of wild plants and useful weeds we mow and call a lawn) and filled her pockets with wild violets. Turns out, they’re very high in vitamin C, but she didn’t know that when she started to forage.

My husband and I each got a glass full of water and a healthy handful of the sweet purple flowers. She came in at regular intervals to be sure we’d drunk our healing elixirs and she was always ready with refills.

(After I texted my friend and verified that the plants were both non-poisonous and actually beneficial, I actually started to take a few tentative sips rather than surreptitiously pouring the love-drink down the bathroom sink!)

When I wasn’t utterly obsessed with my own aching jaw I could see the healer blossoming in this girl.

She has grown up in the house of an energy healer, after all, and she knows we’ll treat a sickness with both an herbal tincture and a drug from the pharmacy, when necessary.

The light in her eyes made me realize it was more than nurture, however. She has the nature of a healer and is offering skills and insight that she has gained over lifetimes, not in a mere seven years.

And she’s dedicated. Before she got ready for school today she made sure to set up my day’s tonic. I’ve got to make sure that my husband and I appear to have taken our full doses before she gets home!

Why am I telling you this story?

In part, it’s because I couldn’t possibly focus on anything else as my body tries to recover from the trauma and my mind tries to integrate the insanity that is having a dentist spend a morning in your mouth.

As I am finally coming back to myself and feel able to sit up and type, it was either tell the story of the moment or say nothing at all.

Plus, it’s part of my job to model how all the little real life moments - the painful experiences and the sweet love - can be and want to be part of your stories.

As a healer - or as a creative entrepreneur or transformation professional whose work makes like a little more beautiful, bearable, or bold - you’re here to meet people in the midst of their struggles. 

As a writer, you’re here to tell authentic stories, either from your own life or from our gorgeous, terrible world. You guide people toward you and your life-renewing work based on the stories you tell.

You're a healer with a pocketful of stories.
You're a storyteller with a pocketful of tales.

A rough weekend at our house gave our girl a chance to offer her empathetic magic. And on Monday morning, that floral concoction gave me just what I needed: the bit of beauty and hope that makes a story worth telling.

Next Monday at 7 PM ET we’ll be visiting the Story Source. In this free workshop I will be offering a series of exercises to help you find your own source of inspiration so you can tell more of the stories that have meaning for you and your audience.

Join us for the free workshop.

What are you doing with your Monday evenings this May? This free workshop is a preview of the storytelling course called Sovereign Story, Sovereign Brand I am teaching next month. 

Make Your Writing Desk a Sacred Space

In the early 1980s, a woman drove north from Massachusetts, crossing the Canadian border and continuing on until the little red Datsun reached the ferry terminal. She and her parents and her small daughter, only a toddler, boarded the boat to Prince Edward Island.

This family, always growing, shrinking, and changing according to the dictates of time, had been driving up to the Maritimes to go “home” to see the relatives since the first generation emigrated to Boston in 1949. We still do (or rather, we will as soon as the word reopens).

I always miss the Island, just as I miss my mom, my grandparents, and the great aunts and uncle we used to visit every summer. Usually, those feelings intensify once June rolls around and I can sense, even from hundreds of miles away, that the lupines are filling the ditches and the water in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is almost warm enough for swimming.

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash

Right now, though, my PEI memory cup is overflowing. I’m imagining one particular road trip when I would have been in a car seat and mom purchased “the desk.”

The desk was - and is - a converted organ that was bought at an auction or some cattle barn that was converted into an antique shop when the farmers stopped working the land and corporate agriculture came in. This lovely old thing sat at the bottom of the formal staircase at my aunt and uncle’s 19th century farm house for two decades. 

It was always “Jeanine’s desk” even though this wasn’t her home and it seemed like she’d never claim it. Finally, Mom and I rented the perfect sized minivan and brought it back with us the summer I got my first apartment.

That was seventeen years ago. 

This desk has moved with me a few times. It has moved around our current house, too. Though I love it, it’s far from ergonomically sound, so it has become something of a storage chest and dumping ground.

But then, I started a new project. 

My new novel is set in the Ireland of two thousand years ago, in the time of the druids, with bits of 18th century Dublin woven into the story, too. As I begin what is bound to be a mammoth undertaking, I’m digging through college lecture notes, combing through genealogical records and ordering scandalously heavy boxes of new books. 

The past feels more present than ever before.

And, even if my new writing project doesn’t involve my ancestors in particular, I am feeling the presence of thrice great grandmothers I have never met as surely as I am feeling my own beloved, more recently departed relations.

We Are Called to Create Our Own Sacred Spaces

Rather than spending the Easter holidays at mass as all my Catholic forebears would have, we devoted our days to shifting furniture and sorting family papers. I have emptied my office, my shelves, my altar, and am still in the long, slow process of putting it all together.

I wasn’t called to find holy sanctuary in a church. I never really have felt that call. Nature has always been my cathedral. And now, I am re-sacralizing my own office as my sanctuary.

It feels so natural, and yet, so new.

Unconsciously, I had always understood this as a sacred creative and healing space. Whether I am working on my own fiction, pulling tarot cards for a client who is trying to find her creative direction, or helping an entrepreneur find the words to describe their own sacred healing work, something special happens when I close the door and devote myself to this kind of writing and conversation.

Now, I realize that I need to create my creative workspace in a deliberate, sacred way.

After this year when our workplaces have changed so much, when we’ve lost access to the libraries and coffee shops that once were our intellectual and creative refuge, it’s more important than ever that we have our own sacred spaces to draft and craft and brith something new.

How Will You Create Your Own Sacred Creative Space?

How will you create your own sacred creative space? I have no idea! I do hope you’ll send me a note or tag me when you share photos of the place where you’re currently making magic or will soon be making the next wonderful thing.

Here are a few ideas that may help you get started...

1. Keep it simple. The goal is to find clarity and inspiration and then start making something magical, NOT to get distracted by the endless details of redecorating. (Making a space beautiful and liveable is a deeply creative act, of course. Just be aware of whether you’re using “I need to make this the perfect sacred space” as an excuse that keeps you from getting to the page and spinning out your stories.)

2. Consider what direction you’ll face. Factor in the light and the warmth of the room, as comfort is an essential part of the sacred creative experience. Also think about whether you’re someone who writes in the morning or at the end of the day. Do you want to face the rising sun (even if you can’t see it)? Is it important that the full moon would shine on your desk at a certain point each month?

3. Make re-sacralizing easy. If you use this space for many activities, from paying bills to doing work for clients, can you shift the energy in the space to call in that certain sacred, creative energy that the most personal projects require? Maybe you light a certain candle or purposefully clear the space of the detritus of the day before you begin.

4. Be comfortable. The reason I was really able to bring this storied desk back into my office and work at it full time? There has been a revolution in home office supplies and I had a million options to choose from when it came to adding a keyboard tray to this piece of furniture that used to be a musical instrument. When I had tried to use this as a desk ten years ago my husband rigged something from scrap wood. There was so much love in those rough boards, but damn, was it ugly! When you (re)create your space, value comfort as much as you value sentiment. 

5. Listen for guidance and look for signs. Part of my quest involved suggestions from an ancestral healing session. My grandmothers from Limerick and Mayo wanted me to call in the family heirlooms as I set the scene for my next book. Your guidance may come from the ancestors, your spirit guides, or the call of the birds. Dare to tune in and heed your intuition.

We Can Write Together, Each In Our Own Sacred Space

In the Sovereign Wisdom Circle, the online community for healers who write and writers who heal, we gather to write together twice per month. We also gather to learn and laugh and share and explore.

Through April 7, we’re welcoming new members to the group. If you’ve been looking for a community that can support you as a healer, a writer, and an entrepreneur, this is the group you’ve been hoping to find.