Becoming

Each of us must write. In life most of us do not discover this truth. Writing is discovery and at our deepest being we are explorers seeking hidden truths about ourselves and our world.

It starts with an audience of one. If you do not yet have a writing practice, start. Write for yourself. Walk into the dark wood and discover. Journey to this place often. In time, darkness will not stop you and you will find home.

As I write both for an audience of one and through this site to a wider audience, indeed I am home when I write. Over time though I discovered a deeper truth for me.

I prefer to paint on a page than build an essay.

I seek metaphor and sentence structure of my device.

I set my end of line.

And begin fresh on a new line.

Verse over prose.   A stanza and not a paragraph.

Rhythm and pacing are important to me and how I create as a writer.  As such, I am in that dark wood and discovering anew.  I am creating my own poetic.

“There are people who defend themselves against being “carried away” by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides. They welcome it repeatedly. They desire is so much they start to crave it daily, nightly, nearly abject to the desire, seeking it out the way hungry people seek out food. It is spiritual sustenance to them. Bread and wine. A way of transformative thinking. A method of transfiguration.

There are those who honor the reality of roots and wings in words, but also want the wings to take root, to grow into the earth, and the roots to take flight, to ascend. They need such falling and rising, such metaphoric thinking. They are so taken by the ecstatic experience – the overwhelming intensity – of reading poems that have to respond in kind. And these people become poets.”

– Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

For you the reader. Write and discover. My own discovery continues.