I tend, I reap, I sow.

Sometimes I wake in the night. The stillness of my room jarring me from slumber. I feel my mind writhing to the surface of consciousness—the need to write so strong I can no longer live in the world of sleep. There is a story. Words—or maybe only one word—swirling, falling, growing, scream to escape. I reach for my laptop—never far away—and methodically, almost naturally, my 45 year-old hands find the keystrokes to my tale—and begin.
Tonight I do not know the story, but there is a seed. A seed of wonderfulness in what I have to say. Cocooned in a tangled, knotted thought process is a tiny, perfect kernel of a story. I write, slowly untangling. I write, painstakingly unknotting. I write, tearing and clawing my way to this pristine seed. As my fingers type, I feel I can once again breathe. My mind begins to settle, the racing of my heart slows, and I inhale deeply.

After several paragraphs, I slow. The stark whiteness of the page mocks me. “You have nothing to write,” it says. But I do—I just don’t know what it is yet. I close my eyes, my hands never leaving “asdfghjkl.” Patiently, I wait. I let the words rise and fall, bobbing in the water of my mind. Those that were never meant to be disappear beneath the dark surface. Others swell suddenly exploding from my thoughts, begging to be put to paper. Vigilantly, I rescue them. Ever mindful of the fragility of words, I carefully pull them to the safety of paper. Many times they are content to be. Some words, however, are more delicate than others. Judiciously, I coddle them. I warm them in the sentence, swaddle them with adjectives, and meticulously find them the perfect nesting place among the other words. Now they are content as well.

I am a writer. My words are alive. Like all living things, they need to be loved. I am the gardener of the seeds of words. I tend, I reap, I sow.