I’m in the weeds with the book today. It’s tough, the rewriting, but it’s getting there.
So instead of writing something brand new here, I want to share something that floated up out of my brain early in this process, when I was still dreaming about what the book would become.
It’s a poem of sorts, an exhortation, a meditation on what makes the writing life so rich. I hope you enjoy.
Write about writing.
Write about meaning.
Write about words, what they are and never can be.
Write about love, and loneliness, and what it means to be alone. And memory, and loss, and how all are rewritten in the telling.
Write about the earth, and the gifts it has given to you.
Write about the books that crafted your world.
Write about choices, and fear, and what you give up in the making of a life.
Write about serendipity, and serenity.
Write about the mind, and its quest for knowing, and its knowing that the knowing will end.
Write about time, the abundance, and the lack.
Write about humanity, that our knowing is all the permanence and the grace we are permitted.
Write about hungry ghosts, and babes swaddled in layers of sin.
Write about the yoke of expectation and the impossible bar.
Write about judgement, and its shedding.
Write about peace, pooling behind your ribs, at the base of your skull, flowing, tensile, over your life.