I Want to Write

I want to write the sort of words that ring in your ears as you read them.  The kind you have to go back and read again.  And again, just because you can’t believe so much beautifulness can come out of ink on a page.

I want to write like the words are fighting to get out, they have so much to say.  I want to have deep and amazing ideas, to mine the depths of human experience and pull up gems that glow in the darkness.

I want the words I write to touch peoples’ hearts, to make them tear up as they read, or print out copies of phrases to tack on the refrigerator.  I want to write something that changes your life, or at least changes a little piece of a life.

I want to hang words neatly around spiritual ideas, to name parts of the thing that’s bigger than we are, that’s so very hard to name, if you can name him at all.  I want to create, if not life-like photographs of God, then at least wobbly water color approximations.

I want to write all of these things, but most of the words that come tumbling out onto the page are tiresome, pedantic recitations, the stories of my life that I’ve been telling for years already, framed with comfortable boundaries not even I would dare cross.  I invite some of the easy memories to float to the top and unfurl on paper.  They are trying desperately to say something but not getting very far.

Any profundity to be had is hidden, I suspect, in the memories I want to push to the end of the line or stuff under a couch cushion, hoping they’ll go away forever.  My mind resists their excavation: what words could possibly come from tender memories whose experience largely defies words?  I don’t want to go there.

But I want to write the sort of words that ring in your ears as you read them.  Where shall I find those words?  I’ll have to go deeper, feel harder, look closer.

I want to write.