Today I am Writing: On Writing

For 365 days, I looked for the thing I was loving the most, and wheedled it into that-one-phrase that spoke to it best. It's what I had time for, capacity for, room.

It was an exercise in simplicity, poetry, vision. I learned what it means to look at something, to see it with your eyes and then spin it into minimal words, the impact of the image taking precedence over the thinking out a thought, but the combination of the two making the moment all the stronger.

Settling ever deeper into my being-ness, I learned to listen to myself, to notice what it is that draws my attention, turns my heart, makes alive my every nerve.

I didn't know what I was doing when I started it, but ultimately it became an exercise that every person inclined toward writing should take. Can you see it? Look at it from every angle, and then say--it?

And I didn't know it when I started it, but it became an exercise of realizing: There is much more about myself as being-in-the-world that I would like to know.

(I think of Emily Rapp, who was thinking of Hegel: things become what they are during the process of  becoming what they are; in other words, all life forms are forged in the fire of a never-ending, tumbling-forward-and-behind-and-sideways process. They don't just land at an end point, whole and complete, and they never stop changing. They never arrive.*)

So, I didn't know it when I started it, but the series of Today I am Loving is (of necessity and who-else-saw-it-coming?) birthing the next series: Today I am Writing.

Some days it might be simple, silly even, sweet; others, the serious, stuff-of-the-earth and the Kingdom-come kind. Every day might be a stretch (my email inbox can tell you that), but every day is what I'd like.

And in the writing I hope to be able to remind myself (and anyone who is right there watching) that we are living in a world that is writhing with desire, for what it means to Live.

*The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp, p. 102