A bolt of light.

The other day, I was riding one of our motorbikes, a rattly old beloved thing, through town to pick up some groceries. I could start many sentences this way. It is what I do. I shop for mangos, lemons, and tomatoes. And somewhere along the way, I had an epiphany.

I don’t say it casually. It truly felt like an epiphany to me. Like a bolt of light, something half-understood now blooming into being, bright enough to cause me to stop on the side of the road and take a shaky breath.

I have spent many months now feeling wordless. It seems to be some sort of mixture of loss and life movements, the unexpected, and the brutal nature of opposing opinions at the current time. It shuts me up inside, my snail antennae retract, I close up like a flower.

Sometimes I can emerge with some hard-fought-for truth or story, holding it up triumphantly.

And then I go back to feeling wordless again, wondering if words will ever come easily or if those times are over.

That brings me to my epiphany. Or maybe to my forgetfulness. You know how God always reminded the Israelites that he was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Because they would always forget if he didn’t remind them?

I have key truths about myself that I remember and forget, over and over again.

—Do not get into intense conversation past 10:00 pm. Maybe not even into non-intense conversations. Just go to bed before Night Rachel comes out.

In addition, to be healthy you need to:

—Walk. Walk and walk and walk and walk.

—Listen to music and walk and look at the light shining through the leaves

—Dance

—Eat your weight in salad

So yes, I was on the bike, maybe at a stoplight or admiring someone’s chubby baby, maybe talking in my head to the other drivers, and I remembered something that I knew and had forgotten.

We have been talking around this topic for a couple of weeks now, but I hadn’t considered it in relation to these words, to my own art, to my work.

Kenya mentioned the other day that she doesn’t see pictures in her head—they appear as she is drawing them.

And I agreed. “That’s how it is with writing for me,” I said. “It’s why I find dictation hard. The words to my stories come straight to the page, almost as if they don’t enter my mind at all.”

I said it. And it still took a couple of weeks for the epiphany to come.

I’ve been waiting for fully-formed stories about my life to come to me for this blog. Nuggets of truth or awareness or thoughts from the day. You guys, I live with myself, inside my own head, and I forgot how I work. Thoughts don’t come to me that way. I sit down and write, and the words come. That’s how it has always been.

The words don’t come until I am in the act of writing them. I don’t know what will be important until my fingers are moving on the keys.

It is the same for art and photography. I work best when I am just going with what is happening right then. The pencil goes where it will, the light hits the right way. That’s all.

Is it an epiphany if it’s just me stopping the bike because I got blindsided by something I forgot? Maybe the epiphany is that I was trying to do things the way I saw other people doing them, and I’m not going to do that anymore. There is so much advice on every platform these days. Don’t forget that you’re your very own self. Your work comes to you the way it comes to you, no one else. Maybe that is fast, imperfect, and disjointed. That’s okay.

How beautiful. And it has good repercussions for writing days ahead.

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