What the River Taught me Last Week.

Meet The Screenless Precepts

Apr 23, 2025

Screenless Thinking

Last week we were in the Smokey Mountains, where I finished up draft 2 of The Screenless Writer.

The river taught me so much. To be more fluid, for one... to surrender... to cut through resistance with soft persistence.

The old Lao Tse adages come to mind:

"Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his heart. Because he has given up helping, he is people's greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical."

The Tao Te Ching in the Stephen Mitchell translation is one of my favorite books.

It inspired Screenless Precep #4:

'Keep it short.'

While navigating physical pages, shorter works make a lot more sense. In the fast paced modern world (which some of us struggle not to loathe), the shorter work is practical. For longer works, link various shorter works together, like Dickens did when his novels were released in serial newsletters.

Most books are 20% inspired, 80% filler. This is for a few reasons and on behalf of the writer and the capacity of the reader. But I'm not afraid to take the axe to that 80% filler. How close can it get to zero?

So this is me writing alongside the Pigeon river (with my trusty muse):

The situation was uncomfortable: insects bit me; it was cold in the morning, and then it was hot. Mysterious vines made me itch. And then, worst of all, hikers dared to disturb me with a friendly greeting, no doubt designed to derail my productivity. Joking. Sort of.

But the ache in the back, a tree stump jutting up into my thigh, the blazing sensations all over the body: those are actually good things, human things. I think we give up so much of our inspiration to comfort. We sacrifice what matters most on the altar of comfort. Which is never a very soul-rewarding experience, is it? I mean, look back on all of your best memories. Was one of them ever... I was so cozy on that pillow I just stayed there and weathered the week?

So the next Screenless Precept:

'Embrace discomfort.'

Go against the grain of the whole culture and trade in your comfort for something more meaningful.

I won't deny, in a way, sitting on a screen scrolling the familiar or the familiar and yet seeming new is comfortable. I read in the bath sometimes, but when I do it too much, it becomes this womb and it disconnects me from reality. When I'm writing and want to wander out into the visceral world, I take a night walk instead, bathe in starlight, and then a quick, cold shower.

While working with clients in healing, I often had them sleep on the floor, or walk barefoot somewhere, or give up the drug of choice. That radical notion heals much.

Nearly Freezing Taught Me the Screenless Precepts

My daughter and I spent days plunging into a frigid river.

I do a cold plunge on most Tuesdays with some fellow lunatics. This water in the Smokies was low fifties, maybe high forties. What I noticed was that you don't want to do it, and after you do it, you don't mind it quite as much, and after you get out, you feel wonderful; the surge of aliveness coursing through the body; that mystical 'skin', the boundary between you and I, between heaven and Earth, inner and outer... oh how suddenly clear it gets.

Trauma healing is in fact a learning to distinguish the 'I' from the 'them'.

So then I came out of the water, dripping, and these Screenless Precepts hit me like a branch in the face. So I added them to the draft.

This is part of the beauty of thinking and writing and being in the Screenless state. Creative solutions arise spontaneously like the flowers bursting out of fertile soil after a seemingly endless winter.

I was also hit with some revolutions for my NEXUS, Screenless Computer, because it took a far away river to teach me how to let go of being anything other than myself.

And yes, my beard comes in and out of my awareness. Sometimes when it comes in, I'm a mountain man and my better half howls at me. And I know it's time to shave, but because I'm a little incendiary, a little rebellious, I only trim... barely.

So the last Screenless Precept for today:

Write in the vicinity of nature, of flowers, of flowing water or breaking waves.