Longing for the Support of My Own Words

As I was poring through some old journals recently, I stumbled upon this entry from journal #16.

Such a hesitancy to start again. How long has it actually been since I’ve been here. It seems like forever. How quickly I forget the path, when I stray from its marked way. So here I am, back again, and I am so excited….

Why has it been so hard to return? Why the procrastination, the lack of will?

I wanted to become a “real” writer, to be able to write about current events, traveling, poetry. Alas it’s the journal wins out!

I have been longing for it too, aching for the support of my own words, my truth, for the time to myself, the silent hour when nothing matters but the workings of my inner self.

I wrote those words within a month of arriving out west in the fall of 1992. One thing drawing me out here was a Vancouver conference called West Coast Women & Words for which I had applied while still in Montreal. I remember giving my mother some writings to type up from journals that I had kept while studying in Bali the spring before.

While I didn’t get accepted to the conference, I came out west anyway. Thankfully.

Here is where my writing was able to take flight.

Here is where the prose in my journals began to soar into poetry, swoop into spoken performance and steady into healing love for myself and others.

Here is where I began to listen to the songs of my body, the rhythms of my literary heart and the rhythms of my bookish dreams.

Would you like to explore your voice and discover what stories are in need of telling?