Learning to trust the process

One of the things you need to learn about writing is how to trust the process, to trust yourself, your imagination, to accept whatever images your imagination gives you, to receive without judgment whatever words appear in your mind, to open the gate and let anything that wants to come onto the page come onto the page. 

You have to learn not to resist, not to judge, not to second-guess, to simply allow whatever words need to come to come, and to write them down as quickly as you can before they disappear and go back into hiding and you can't see them again. 

You have to accept the mystery, the inability to explain how or why it works, and simply let your pen move over the page, like taking dictation, only the voice is sometimes barely audible--sometimes not audible at all--and you have to make sense of the whisper of the wind or the sound of silence, and somehow it's like a dream and somehow you find the words, and somehow you breathe the words onto the page.

And you open your eyes to find what you needed to write only after you put your pen down, take a breath, and look down at the page that, only moments ago, was blank.

And now--behold!-- it is filled with words that somehow came from some hidden source, perhaps from thin air, perhaps from your pen, perhaps from your heart.