It's like a miracle happens

Each morning I set aside 

a half-hour to write these pages.

It's the time of day I love--

the silence of early morning, 

the blank pages waiting

in anticipation for words,

the not knowing what I'll find 

on the page, what ideas

or thoughts I might discover.

It's like a miracle happens 

every morning: I open my eyes 

and get out of bed and sit at my desk 

and hold this pen and move my hand 

across the page and see words appear 

beneath my hand, and at the end of 

the 30 minutes I can find a page 

or more filled with words 

like a bucket filled with water, 

sustenance of life, 

evidence of my presence

that I am here, alive, 

savoring this moment. 

End of Year Musings

It’s the end of the year and who can count how many hours we’ve sat at our desks waiting for words while the minutes passed by and our lives slipped off in directions that we could never have predicted?

Who can count the number of words or sentences or stanzas that we’ve written or the journal pages onto which we’ve poured our hearts?

Each year December comes like this, dark and dreary, with freezing rain and sleeting snow and a sense of doubt and hopelessness—and yes, with regrets, too—and then the sun makes its turn, and days begin to lengthen again as the earth sails into a new year.

And just as surely as the return of the sun and the dispersal of darkness, our words come, too—if we believe in the process and in ourselves—shyly, at first, perhaps, but they come again with a fresh urgency and need, seeping up out of the thawing ground, pouring forth like a melting stream onto a new page.

If we can hold onto our belief through the darkness and doldrums and frigid days of silence, if we can trust in this mysterious process to bring us what we need when we need it, if we can keep sitting at our desks and doing our work, waiting however long we might need to wait, then we can say we have written without regrets.

We’ve done our best.

And that is all anyone can ask.

It doesn’t matter whether we write fiction or poetry, memoirs or investigative journalism, short stories or novels, journal entries, notes on scraps of paper, forgotten thoughts in the margins of books that we've loved over the past year.

What matters is that we are still writing, still using pen and paper to explore the world and our life, still curious about what we might be thinking and eager to find out (thanks to the words that we put on paper) what thoughts are swirling through our heads, what emotions are hiding in our hearts.

It takes a stubborn determination and unrelenting perseverance to write.

Some writers may give up after only a few minutes of facing a blank page, the critical voices in our heads growing louder and louder until the voices become unbearable and we can’t stand to hear them anymore and have to push away from the desk and shout “Enough!” 

But other writers may just glare at the blank page and say, “Really? You think you can scare me? You think you can win?” And we stand up and go into the kitchen and brew a fresh pot of coffee, or steal a cookie from the cookie jar, and return to our desks and wait for the words to come.

And we wait for as long as we need to wait believing that patience is stronger than impatience and that words are stronger than silence.

Thanks to all for stopping by Wordswimmer this past year. Your presence in the water has helped keep me afloat more than you can know. May the the year ahead bring you a sweet-flowing river of words and stories.

Are You A Writer?

Can you accept imperfection?

Can you accept that you'll need to revise again and again (and still again), that the word you're looking for may not appear until the twentieth or thirtieth draft? 

Can you accept that one day your writing will flow like wine and the next day the well may run dry and all you can do is sit at your desk and stare for hours at an empty screen?

Can you accept that one scene on a given day may work beautifully but adding another scene on the following day may make the previous scene unnecessary?

Can you accept that the purpose of your first draft is to lead you to your second draft and the purpose of the second draft is to lead you to your third, on and on until the story comes together?

Can you live for days or months or years with failure (which is what others will call your efforts if you don't publish your work) and accept that those---who see not publishing as failure---fail themselves to understand writing as an ongoing process?

Can you accept the unexpected mountains that you'll have to climb and the unanticipated twists and turns in the road and enjoy the journey for its own sake, not for where the road might take you but for the pure pleasure of being on the road?

Can you accept that you'll find others on the road who will try to discourage you from continuing on your journey (and yet you still keep writing)?

Can you hold fast to your own belief in yourself?

Can you steer through darkness by the solitary flame of hope that burns in your heart?

Can you find joy in writing with or without financial gain or reward or recognition?

Can you keep writing so that at the end of your journey, when you no longer have the strength to lift a pen but still feel the desire to write, you can say you gave your best?

Then, perhaps, you are a writer.