Not seeing the words as they came out of me created a beautiful distance. Freedom. Every word was pitched into the black canyon where even I couldn’t find them (unless I opened my eyes). There was no echo.
I’ve been reading Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. It’s wild, too. It’s so good. What else can I say? At one point, she describes her habit of writing sentences on top of each other. Over the space of a line or two in your notebook, you can write hundreds of sentences. The words become indecipherable, just a tangle of lines and splotches. There’s no getting those sentences back.
Writing is vulnerable. Self-expression is terrifying. Not everything you need to say or write needs to be heard or read.
When I lived by the ocean, I used to walk down Newcomb Hollow beach on gray winter days and say things into the waves. The words came out of my mouth, but even I couldn’t hear them. They melted into the deep.
The spark has been snapping in me lately. It is lured out by: good music, quiet evenings, beautiful books, candlelight, slow food, winding conversation. I am cultivating it, I think.
“My own hand, with pen in place, bushwhacks through my psyche, cutting through the dense understory of random thoughts. As my black pen circles back on itself, destroying as it creates, hiding what has just been written as another sentence walks across the newly exposed words, I am freed. My repetitions tell me the truth the moment they are drawn. And then, in the process of layered language, a path is cleared. I see where I need to go. These ephemeral paragraphs, which even I cannot decode once they have been tracked, turn into reimagined glyphs. Their meaning resides in the process of obfuscation. There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.” - Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
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