I need to find time to write.

I’ve got words chasing me. Catching up to me. Taking me over. They swirl through my brain, slam me down on the ground. They make me stop walking, dreaming, eating, talking. I scrawl them down in my journal, on scraps of paper, write them on my hand, pray for a few more seconds at the red light so I can get them out before traffic starts moving again, repeat them over and over in my head to try and make them stick.

I’ve got them catalogued all through my overwhelmed mind and body. I’ve got some recorded in my head, there’s that one funny little story I’m storing on the tip of my right pinky finger, a whole bunch of poems living in a tight uncomfortable ball right in the center of my gut, and some beautiful inspiration that wants to dance outward from my heart into my limbs until my arms spread like wings and my feet dance in joy.

I have a sense of how I want to shape them, what I want them to become. I can feel them as they are meant to be when they finally get patched together into some recognizable whole. I can see that white screen filling itself with neat font as my fingers clickety-click along the keyboard, see the pages of my plain black fabric journal filling with the loops and swirls my handwriting takes when I get lost in the flow of pen on paper. I yearn for that sense of contended emptiness that only comes when the words are released, recorded, given a home and purpose and an existence of their own.

I panic when they start to slip away. When I lose their essence in the rush from here to there and this to that. Those words make sense out of the craziness, they knit together the fragments. All these words, they are me, they are my story, they are my world. Where can I put them so that they’ll keep till there is time to gently nurture them to life? How can I keep them relevant while the days and weeks and months keep rushing by? What becomes of the story when the words cease to be? Is a life unrecorded different than what it would have been if it had been written?

It’s the writing that feeds me more than anything, and yet it is the writing that is the first thing to get set aside in favour of editing photos and caring for children and doing school work and washing dishes and surfing blogs and brushing teeth and living life. But if the writing of life gets lost in the living of life, well then I fear that all that living means less, exists less, is simply less. Anne Morrow Lindberg said ‘I must write it out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living’.

I know there is not a writer out there who does not know that feeling of being taken over by the words, that although they are of you, they are also sometimes MORE than you, deeper than you, bigger than you, beyond you. To ignore all these words that want so desperately to become, it feels disrespectful, careless. I feel a responsibility to those words, a sense of mutual ownership that is deserving of my attention and time without any expectation other than that I will honour those words as best as I can.

I need to find time to write.