I don’t know how to write. I think writers must have these words and phrases all figured out in their heads before they sit down with their notebook or laptop. Words and phrases just waiting to be spilled out onto paper. Only rarely do I have the words. Most of the time, I have a picture, an image, maybe a little dream fragment that lingers and these are what I try to describe with words.
I have a part-time job that I drive to on a weekly basis. It’s seventy five miles away. On a good day, it’s an hour and fifteen. When the traffic is horrendous, it’s two hours. I find myself, lately, driving in silence for at least the first hour. In the past, I’d have the radio on for company, but nowadays I use the time to think.
I written before about bicycling, and how ‘inner truths’ come into my mind whilst the rational brain part is focused on all the details of bicycling. I think I’m doing the same thing now when driving. Most of the time, my driving is automatic and everything is being handled without intervention. It’s then when the inner truth telling begins.
I know exactly why the image came to be in my dream. A strange image of ‘then now’ and ‘now now’ rolled together without any passing of time. I’m sure it was because I looked through my photo library over the past ten years, collecting photos for a project. The dream image was of me picking up glass from a framed photo that I had knocked to the floor. The glass pieces were super sharp and all of my fingers were cut, blood dripping onto the floor, the glass, the photo. I was thinking about picking up the photo and sliding the glass pieces into the bin, but I was certain that the glass would slash through the photo and ruin it in the ‘then now’. I get a metallic taste in my mouth when I’m bleeding, and this dream image was complete with the taste of blood. And in the same moment, in the dream state, my now healed fingers were gently picking up the pieces of glass, placing the shattered glass in the garbage.
I’m left with this broken picture frame, a slightly cut and blood spattered photo, and questions. Should I try to repair the frame? Throw it all out and let it go, to try to forget any of it happened? Tuck the photo into a box and hold onto it for some as-yet-unknown reason?
I suppose part of the way I’m feeling is from doing my current job: repairing old things. Like I can go back in time and fix the problems that I created. In some way, if I did the best I could at the time, if I can take it a little less personally, if I can give myself the gift of love, of self-forgiveness, it’ll be better.
Feather in the Wilderness 
You are indeed a gifted writer, from whence it comes is no significance. You write from your heart and it sees clearly. No need to go back to fix errors, just go boldly into today and tomorrow with the self-assurance that you are indeed OK.
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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go back in time and fix all the stuff we messes up? Not so easy. We do what we can now.
Writing — Just write the conversation in your head, the conversation to a trusted friend that you would be sharing your heart with or telling a story. Then just go back and clean up the grammar and punctuation, edit a bit, if you want. But don’t get hung up on that till you’re done. It’s not that hard to write it. The hard part is knowing what you want to say. So if you write it down and it makes little sense, at least you have something to work with, to edit, to put in the order you probably would have meant it in if you were going more slowly. The writing is easy. It’s the editing that’s hard! And also so much fun!
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