Breaching the Dam

They arrive in early January, two books full of my writing from the previous year. Every year since 2008 there’s been one, and this year there’s a second volume with my poems. One book goes on the shelf next to the others; the poetry one remains on the table beside my chair. I think I might look through it one day.

In March, I pick up the thin volume that contains pieces of my soul—or, said differently, my poems. Ah, yes. I remember her. I fell away from my write-a-bad-poem-every-day practice early this new year when the weight became more than I could carry. Numb, because feeling nothing was safer than the alternative. I can’t point to one thing, because it was an accumulation of things, some dragged into the new year like worn-out baggage I wanted to leave behind but didn’t know where to drop off. Others, stabs in my heart by events far and near that just. Plain. Hurt.

You don’t put things down on paper to produce masterpieces, but to gain some clarity. ~ Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

We write to express our innermost thoughts, to vent and get feelings out before they fester, to figure things out by sorting our whirlwind thoughts into manageable piles. We write to document our days, to remember moments that otherwise would be lost.

And there are sweet times when the writer dances in the liminal between that which is seen and just barely perceived, conjuring something of both melded into one. Something magical. A sentence—even a fragment—or, if she’s exponentially blessed, a paragraph or more. These are the times we hunger for.

There’s no formula or 5-step-plan that can make it happen, it’s butt-in-the-chair day after day, week after week, on and on ad infinitum, learning and practising and hoping after hope that something worth our time and effort will spill out. It takes work. And discipline. And practice. We write because we can’t not write, but, paradoxically, sometimes we can’t write.

And so it is that as I turn pages in my little poetry volume and read a few verses, I feel the grief of not being able to write give way to desire, and the dam inside me—the very one I wrote prophetically about last year—bursts. Sometimes, it seems, the writer’s own words can mend what was broken in the very one who penned them.

(I’m going to change the fourth line slightly in revision but for now, this is my chosen mantra for 2026.)

Suddenly, I’m hungry for the rush that only comes from writing.

The Poet
(Prompt from Tweetspeak. Beginning with “out of the.”)

Out of the forest, where I wandered,
trying to make myself look like a tree
(and not just any tree, 
but one with leaves the same shape 
and shade of green as the others), 
comes this hybrid. 
Part tree, part fern, part lichen. 
A new species.

I think of a writer whose books have been influential in my spiritual and creative growth, and search to see what new work they might have published. This person has barely any online presence save for a Facebook page that was last updated in 2023. There’s a link to a website bearing the author’s name but it no longer exists. There’s another site with the number 2 after the name in the url and a contact form where one can sign up for a newsletter. I enter my name and email address, but the form doesn’t work.

I’m strangely comforted by the fact that this person who contributed so profoundly to my life through their words isn’t spending these days hawking them online. Maybe they’re writing. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re no longer alive and all they will write has already been penned. Regardless, their words mattered. To this woman, hungry for something she couldn’t name who found it in their books, they, and their words, mattered.

I’m reminded that the influence a writer has in the world is not tied to the number of online platforms they’re active on or the volume of people who subscribe to their Substacks or websites. It’s the words themselves that make the difference. And whether an author publishes one book or ten or none, has thousands of followers or none, if they’re faithful to the work there’s a strong chance it will impact at least one person—and that is enough. It should be enough. It is enough.

Choosing to remain active online in this space or that is just that: a choice. It’s one we make for a season and reevaluate when something changes. (Make no mistake, not giving this consideration is making a choice in itself.) There’s no one size fits all, no right vs wrong.

The speed and pace of our life here in this country, the noise and the demand of it, the sheer unadulterated motion of it, are almost too much for me to cope with. ~ Robert Benson, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True: The Road Home to God, 1996

If the demands of the world were overwhelming for Robert Benson in 1996, imagine the impact twenty years later in 2026 when all of this *waves hands around* is happening. Some feel it more than others and, for better or worse, I’m one of the feelers. Maybe you too?

I feel pretty jaded about a lot of things. Lately I’ve been turtling (so called after the defensive posture a turtle takes by retreating into their shell when they feel unsafe). Everything “out there” feels like too much, and my natural response is to withdraw where it’s safe and quiet and I can think. In the sanctuary I make choices, change direction, let things go and consider picking other things up to fill the space left behind. (But no. Not yet. Maybe not ever.)

Anyway, my creative dam has been breached and creativity is flowing again. It took words to chip away at the blockage until it let go so more words can be released. Makes one want to write even more, doesn’t it? I’m back to my write-a-bad-poem-a-day routine in the morning; it feels so right for this season. That, and longhand journaling and blogging, is enough for now, and maybe always.

(This has been cross posted on Substack.)