My Favorite Writing Self

My favorite writing self is someone who sits in light, body relaxed but alert, ears open, eyes wide but not about to burst into tears. She steps on a stile and goes over a fence, works through the tough passage then skips through the rest until another tough passage arrives. She doesn't run from its demands but doesn't force things either. She is not at war with herself about will she do it or won't she. She is not trying to prove something to anyone, herself included. She's simply filling her time and her space with arrangements she makes anyway, whether she writes them or not. These words that she once used as weapons or shields are her modest star relays, one eye to the next, the light always arriving but never quite here; the texture of what the earth makes her to be—beyond time, within time—can burn like a fire, crackling there.

A fire, crackling there. It's a sign she's alive. My favorite writing self dives but won't drown. She's immersed and she's present for all of it. When she's worried, she shepherds all her worries to a fold. They rest while she labors, and then, while she rests, they spackle the pasture. Their presence makes it green.

It's physical. My favorite writing self is there with all her body, and her body breathes and lets the mind go where the writing takes it. The body says, I'm here for you; when you are still, I move; when I am still, you move. And we are friends for the duration, who really aren't two different beings, after all, but sides of a wide circle, turning.

My favorite writing self loves circles. There may be storylines, and one thing may come before the other, but she always writes a spiral on which stopping and starting are neither painful nor pronounced.

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