To Write

Writing can be many things: a journey, a portal into new worlds, a letter to those who might read it.
A conversation, a process, a means to an end and an end in itself.

It’s a means of education and enlightenment, and a way of connection and storytelling that lies at the foundation of all great civilisation; a mode of transmitting information as simple as it is profound, wearing as many faces as there are stars in the sky.

Writing is accessible to all, yet achieving mastery in it can be as elusive as catching a deer that disappears into literary mist.

Writing is words, and words are, in all their apparent simplicity, fluid, changeable creatures prone to masquerades and the kind of volatile caprice only writers intimately know.
Words have the power to destroy and create, to grow and to cut – sharpen and define, or muddy the waters; confound or elucidate, ring with music or fall flat as stones on concrete.

Writing is a channel, and the act of creation. Ex nihilo, something out of an apparent nothing: a thought manifested in ink, a thing inchoate and ethereal made flesh on the page. Writing ties together the seen and the unseen, riding on the force of imagination and vision with nothing but marks on a medium, inked symbols of agreed significance. It is thought made word, and in the cosmic as in the personal, a word sits at the beginning of creation.

Once upon a time. It was. This happened. That could come to pass.
Writing allows us to both look back and to cast our sights to the future; it allows us to transcend the bounds of our earthly dwellings and draws out the order from chaos. Through writing we sift the gold from the gravel in the river of life and refine the gems hidden in the dirt. Writing purifies thought and crystallises the mind, opens the heart and guides the flow of energy.

I write because I want to go on unforeseen journeys and take others with me, too.

I write to weave patterns from webs of thought and add my own stars to the sky of consciousness.

I write to create, and to live – lives I never would have lived, worlds I never would have seen.

I write to discover and question, to probe the fullness of being human in all its complexity, to connect with a flow of history greater than myself.

Writing is power; writing is human. This is more important than ever in an age where we are handing over that intrinsically human capacity to spiritless machines. It’s more important than ever to cultivate our ability to build ships from driftwood and capture the sparks that make us catch our breaths and run shivers down our spines.

I think, therefore I am.
I think, therefore I write.

Let’s create stories worth writing and remembering.

x The Foxglove Scribe