There’s a nook in my heart; a little wooden desk bearing a collection of beloved, dog-eared books, chocolate candies and ball-point pens, next to the window open to the world.  It’s here that I am found on sleepless nights, reading the Leaves of Grass by the quiet gold light of the desk lamp.  I’ve always loved Whitman’s verses, the way the various lines and melodies rise from the page, dancing and curling in perfect grace, as if to mock me in my own inferior efforts.  How often, after those long reveries, do I entreat my pen to make me worthy of such a stroke of brilliance. 

Creation in itself, the point of the pen on the pale blue lines, the heart rushing forth realizing the potential of those blank spaces; the very thought of it is rapturous.  But it is such a breakable, fragile, inconstant thing.  Take one wrong step, and it’s dampered forever.

A man I once knew said that he saw a light in me, struggling to keep alive, as though there was a mirror held to it at different angles, the beam dimming and waxing as it moved.  In turn I told him of a long-lost dream that I’ve kept hidden away in a locket and chain: to feel the light suddenly flowing forth from me, every word a truth, every line a dancer in my own minuet. How I’ve hungered for it, beauty limitless and unstrained!   How I’ve longed to embrace it!  W. Somerset Maugham tells me in the plainest and truest words, “Beauty is an ecstasy, it’s as simple as hunger.” And I know it.

During these long nights at my desk, papers tossed aside, empty teacups standing nearby with moist brown stains settling on their rims, the hours pass slowly as I tear at my heart.  I’ve often thought of writing as a contest. In the competitive races for publications, reviews, publicity, or awards, it all comes down to this. Which heart can evoke the simplest yet most profound image of beauty from its depths? And how long can we endure the excavating, lying awake these long nights with our eyes burning and our desires eluding us?

Too often have I found the flow of my words constricted or blocked by thoughts of my superiors, or my own recognition. Though I realize that’s not what it’s about. “A writer has a block when she doesn’t believe in what she’s writing,” Sarah Ban Breathnach reminds me. Lying here with the carved wood of my desk forming engravings on my forehead, I begin to think of the pieces I had composed in the past.  The flowing, simple, prolific ones that I loved the most. The poems of throwing my head back to taste the air of summertime, the calling of the seashore and the fields with their wide open spaces, poems of pride and passion, poems of soaring over the world like a bird, my freedom and majesty unmatched.

And that’s when I realized what I had known all along. The things I had written all of my life symbolize what I am and what I desire to be. This elusive but brilliant light in the center of my soul could be set loose if only I had the strength to be what I was meant to be.  If I could be natural, free of the judgments and critiquing of other people. If I could let my true, human nature reign, and live only as I choose to live making no compromises, then that spasm of ecstatic energy triggered by my writing would never be compressed.  Then my potential could be fully unleashed.

“Does all sit there with you, with the mystic unseen soul?” asks the faded Leaves of Grass.  In answer I tuck it away beneath Dickinson and Thoreau, and pick up my pen.