THE VITAL WRITER

I write for my life.

It is both vital and vitalizing for me to write.

Without writing—writing essays, writing verses—my life would be diminished: less thoughtful, less interesting, less artful, less significant.

Writing enhances my experience of life as no other practice could do—not conversation, not meditation, not contemplation, although something of all three feeds my writing.

And old, seemingly silly saying has long been my motto as a writer: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”  Although attributed to a garrulous Old Lady, it proves true with me quite seriously. 

The pen in my hand moving across the lines of the pad in my lap seems like a magic wand that summons something out of nothing, something visible and tangible where only blankness was.  What flows from my pen is not perfect, only palpable.  It will need reconsidering and revising, but at least it’s now manifest.

What till then was only latent, inchoate, unrealized is now a wordstream, formulated and recorded, no longer nebulous.

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