Ready

There’s been a silence around here lately – a muffled echo of chirping crickets. It’s been on my mind, this echo, although you’d never know it by looking. I think of it often, in the curtailed moments between tasks (maintaining – a spirit-crushing formality, no?). To say the emptiness doesn’t sadden me would be a lie. I miss it – the satisfaction of completing a post, the reassurance of documentation. Why wouldn’t I? It was a Hail Mary pass in the face of profound fear, a last-minute life raft to keep me afloat … a leap of courage to call my own.

But a shift is happening – tectonic plates moving and settling – and for the first time in a long time, I’ve been very careful not to touch them as they do their work. The wheels are still spinning, but I’m letting them spin. I’m not throwing myself into the grinding mechanism in order to get a close-up of the bolts, which, in a telling twist of events, means I have less desire to blog. As I loosen my grip on control, my urge to document tapers. It’s strange and scary and fiercely exhilarating.

Somehow, sitting and knowing is becoming enough. Somehow, an audience of one is beginning to suffice. Somehow, by the grace of a plan I refuse to dissect, I’m becoming all I need.

All this time I thought I was heading somewhere outside myself – somewhere grand and fancy – but it turns out the final destination has always been me. I am the end, the fancy. I am the hero I’ve been searching for. Don’t you see? All the words in the world mean nothing by comparison, and trying to rein in the magic only dilutes it.

I love writing the way a mother loves her child – finally and freely, proudly and protectively – and will do it every day for as long as I’m able. I have unfinished short stories in a folder on my desktop, a lovely little novel 20,000 words shy of completion. I have journal entries, song lyrics, poems, and anecdotes burning pages in my notebook and holes in my brain. I know what it means to be authentically inspired and intrinsically motivated – to want to write just for the sake of writing – and that, my friends, is where I want to be. Today and all the days after.

So I’m easing up on the blog front. I’m taking a step back and being still with the hard stuff instead of trying to quantify it. Words are sacred. They shouldn’t be used to fix or control, but to live.

There’s a small voice in the still of my soul that’s been waiting years to be heard. You don’t need an audience, she’s been saying. You have me. And she’s right. Patient, strong, and right.

I hear her now.

And I’m ready to listen.