All writing is a question left unanswered.
I have been writing for most of my life and hiking for a little over a year. I am bad at hiking. My heart beats too fast and my breath is too short. Still I like this feeling of focusing on just one foot finding its way through. This feeling of giving in, of letting your whole brain and body go towards one step, and then the next. Trying, again and again.
I like the possibilities of a mountain path. You might meet circling buzzards. Wild ibex melting into brown stone. Humble swifts making a home out of a cold grey gliff. The peaks you see and cannot name. A tree wrapped in a beautiful scarf someone made just for it. You might walk all day wrapped in light white clouds and only hear the waterfall, and only guess what might have been close.
I think this is also what writing is, sometimes. Finding your way on a path you do not know, but mostly keeping your eyes out. Listening out for what questions the path might ask. Knowing you do not have any of the answers. Knowing what matters is the “how” of each of these questions, how you receive them and how you carefully hold them, how you refuse to stop asking them again and again.
I write and what I am asking you is: how do we do it? How do our hearts hold up everyday ? How do we look this world in the eye everyday and keep walking and keep writing? How do we find a way to shelter each other, to refuse to drift away on rafts bound for shipwreck if we do not hold each other close? To care for each other the way someone might knit a scarf for a tree, never being asked to, just needing to care, needing the tree to make it through winter frost?
All writing is a hand extended. Waiting for something to happen. I don’t have the answers. I leave blanks in between words, paragraphs, and right there at the end. Room for you to breathe. To make something out of this, maybe. Enough space to fill with a song, to find a path to the closest mountain, to build a lopsided but warm shelter.
This gentle invitation. Hand, thread, wing, leaf all stretching towards you.