Why do I write?

Writing to me is deep work, sacred work, hard work, mostly impossible-to-execute work. I still spend most of my waking moments thinking about writing, and sometimes write, because:

· I think best through writing. Writing helps me make my tangled experiences more coherent. It is the method to my madness.

· I write because I want to see. I want to develop the fine eye of insight and the luminosity of heart that precede and accompany good writing. As Robert Henri says, “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

· I write because I want to be seen. I’m often shy in physical spaces, and try my best to make myself invisible and unheard. The longing to be seen, however, persists. Writing makes it possible for me to show up and be seen in the most honest and authentic way possible.

· I write to tell stories. Stories are the tiniest coherent bits of my universe that allow me to dive in and resurface with a gift of insights into the heart of the matter. It is through stories that I wish to offer nourishment, encouragement and hope from my singular experience of being human, to yours.

· I write because I want to alchemize my experiences of happiness and grief and the fleeting rainbows in between into a form and practice of remembrance.

· I literally want to re-member the parts of myself that I may have lost, misplaced or hidden away, and hold them up to the light. Call back the lost flock and bring them home. Jung calls this individuation. This calling back needs me to use my voice and my own music, because that’s what my flock will recognise and respond to over anything else.

· I write to offer essential services to my fellow humans. Mary Oliver says of poetry, and this is true of the kinds of writing I want to practice, “For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” Whether I’m writing, or listening to a fellow writer’s illuminated and shadow-riddled journey with words, I’m holding space for something that’s life-affirming, even life-saving.

· I write because I want to be remembered.