Monthly Archives: July 2011

“The page is no place, today, for what is pulling at my heart. Notebooks get misplaced; they lie around; they flip open in the wind. Who might see these pages, read them?  My heart is a secret place, especially now. The wide open plain of a page is a place with no boundaries, no etiquette, no conventions. How would I begin to lay the fervid, lumpy core of myself out there in the open where I myself could no longer shield my eyes from it? What might happen? It could bleed through, soak all the pages in the book, slop onto the floor, stain the carpet. It could make a mess so bad that no one could clean it up. I might still be there, scrubbing at the pentimento of its spillage, decades from now.”

–End Brock, in response to the prompt, “What’s pulling on your heart today?”

Who’s sitting on your shoulder telling you what you can and can’t say?

If the fear of having your work read by others is making you censor yourself, consider strategies for keeping your writing private. I’ve had students get safety deposit boxes, lock boxes, and locked file cabinets. Others have stored their writing notebooks or discs with a writing partner, a therapist or a friend.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs . . . ask yourself what makes you alive because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

–Rainier Maria Rilke

What makes me come alive?

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”

–Alan Cohen

What needs to be born in you right now?