Giving Yourself Permission to Write

It’s a gift, isn’t it? This chance we have to interact with our
world in words. This chance to build connections between people, between
cultures, between those mountains and this shoreline, between the moment when
the trees are bare and the moment when the snow begins to fall.

Saying It

Saying it. Trying

to say it. Not

to answer to

logic, but leaving

our very lives open

to how we have

to hear ourselves

say what we mean.

Not merely to

know, all told,

our far neighbors;

or here, beside

us now, the stranger

we sleep next to.

Not to get it said

and be done, but to

say the feeling, its

present shape, to

let words lend it

dimension: to name

the pain to confirm

how it may be borne:

through what in

ourselves we dream

to give voice to,

to find some word for

how we bear our lives.

Daily, as we are daily

wed, we say the world

is a wedding for which,

as we are constantly

finding, the ceremony

has not yet been found.

What wine? What bread?

What language sung?

We wake, at night, to

imagine, and again wake

at dawn to begin: to let

the intervals speak

for themselves, to

listen to how they

feel, to give pause

to what we’re about:

to relate ourselves,

over and over; in

time beyond time

to speak some measure

of how we hear the music:

today if ever to

say the joy of trying

to say the joy.

          by Philip Booth, from Lifelines

Get out there and write this week. Make sure you add your
voice, make connections, go ahead. Give yourself permission.

take care,
Erin