Why I Write

Kim Stafford writes, "Life is a universe of fragments yearning for coherence." And this is why I write, for synthesis, wholeness. I write to understand the fragments of my sadness, like individual cello notes longing for both the harmony and dissonance that create a concerto. I write because there is dew on the Canna and I miss you ~ yet I'm not really supposed to miss you and I don't understand. I write to make sense of why some people irritate more than delight me. I write to try to make sense of a senseless war, of hostile treatment of others, of differences in beliefs and the need to be right. I write from wonder.

Paint peels off the summer deck. What does it remind me of, teach me to re-member? Antique gray pushes through a fresh coat of green ~ indentations of the past converge with now in a message ~ a message of what? Planks of pine are filled with woody knots, whirls of trapped grains pooled together to create curves of intrigue, or are they bumps in an otherwise straight and narrow road. What layers of old are ready to peel from me this day, this weekend, this minute, starting yesterday? Paint chips, morning stillness, crimson honeysuckle and hummingbird busyness, blackberries in an orange bowl. And ease. I wonder.

These associations, oblique to cliche, can transform me if I choose to notice. If I listen to the universe outside of me, the large and the small of it, maybe I will begin to make sense of what churns within. Maybe I will begin to create my own whole constellation of random stars, asters from dis-asters, lucidity from these fragments of light. And wonder.