The Gaps Become Gardens

On writing not to describe the world, but to become it

When I was a child, I wanted to be a tree.
Not like a tree. Not near a tree.
Just: tree.

I believed if I could stand still long enough, the world would grow up around me.

What is creative writing, if not the slow stitching of bark back to skin? The leafing out of our interior wilderness?
When I write, the membrane thins. I remember that moss has a memory. That lichen is not a thing but a relationship. That the words I reach for have already been whispered by wind.

They say “find your voice,” but the voice I find when I write is not mine. It’s the one that lives just below the tongue, in the dirt, in the body of a snake warming itself on a sunlit trail.
It hisses listen.
It says stop naming and start noticing.
It says become porous.

There’s a bird in the page.
Its wings beat whenever I get close to something true.
If I look directly at it, it vanishes.
If I write around it—
there it is again, ruffling the sentence.

Sometimes I forget the world is real.
The red eft curling beneath the log…