Scenes from a Life: Words {8/9}

What runs through your veins? Words course through hers.

If you could see inside her mind, words would be whorling through it at all times. She reaches out and snatches them from the storm as she moves through the world. They allow her to interpret experience. They afford her expression of feeling. She lives and breathes them. They are her lifeblood.

She can't remember a time when she wasn't recording them. She is never separated from her journal. (Until a basement flood destroyed it, she kept a box of journals she had been writing in since childhood, a narrative of a life-in-progress. Now only the last five years of that narrative survives.) She keeps lists of words that resonate with and move her. She jots down memories and images that surface into her consciousness. And she's always written letters to those she holds close.

At one time that practice employed stationery, fountain pens, sealing wax, and a monogrammed stamp. Now a keyboard is the medium for most writing of length. But she still makes it a habit to send a handful of lettermail each month — handwritten words on postcards and linen paperstock. Because words written by hand with ink are not just tangible; they also have emotional mass. In today's age especially, they inform the recipients that they matter.

And that, perhaps, it is her guiding principle. "Spend it, shoot it, play it, lose it ... give it, give it all, give it now. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." She knows Annie Dillard is talking about creativity, but this is how she feels about words — especially the ones that describe her heart.

Life is too damned short to hide and hoard them. Life is to damned short to let them be obfuscated. So she lets them pour. She lets them expose who and what she is at her core. And to those who matter, she offers them as generously and honestly as she can. She cannot bear the thought that someone who is special, treasured, and loved by her would never know it. So she tells them.

Words reveal her heart. When you read her, know you are hearing it beat from the inside.

Soundtrack: Sleater-Kinney, "Words and Guitar"