Startling, How Words Come

The first mark you make starts the process. Or word. The first word you write sets your direction.

But something comes before the word. It is the decision to write, to speak. Or the need.

Your entire being can command you in the direction of your keypad, find you opening your phone, scrambling for a pen, something, anything, to write it down on, to record it. I’ve used napkins, carried notebooks, written on my jeans, scribbled sentences across my hands.

That propulsion feels different than a decision to wake early. There is imperative to act. Less hemming and hawing, more scrambling and scribbling, at least that’s how it was when poems used to arrive, before I stopped writing. When I wasn’t aware of blinking.

What propels us, urges us, causes us to create? If we follow the traces back like a three year old child asking why, we will meet vitality or hear God speaking. You might think they are the same thing but they are not.

Vitality overrides doubt and takes up space. It is alive and will speak. It can crack cement, take over cities, thrive against all odds in desolate places and bloom anyway. It can also forget God.

When God speaks there is no forgetting. Instead we are emptied in order to be filled, unblocked to become conduit. What we think doesn’t matter. We are charged with something forever greater, than us. We become scribe.