Writing Down the Bones

“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life...I am trying to come alive, to find the distance in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.” 

NATALIE GOLDBERG  from "Writing Down the Bones"

I stop writing down the bones and start to feel for them instead.  Watching the numbers fall away, I think I can keep myself from falling. It's not about wanting to be thin, but about trying to balance the weight of it all.  It started over half a lifetime ago when I carried hurt inside that felt like I'd been cut right open and sown up again with a belly full of rocks. I wanted nothing more then than to be pure spirit, to be free of all that held me down.

I write to make myself see these things, to remember how the scars were made and how the pain was fleeting. I'm a burden-carrier. I've always known it. But to carry the weight of others' broken I need to learn to carry my own. My strength lies in words. I forget it over and over again and forget to eat instead. I write to make sense of my life; to untangle the wild, crazy, bewilderingly beautiful mess of it all and hope that after the unravelling and the reravelling, the spinning and the weaving, I might yet count it all joy.