There are words lying hidden, buried, covered over and root-bound, dormant, waiting to be unearthed. To be discovered, pulled up by the roots and held up to the light. An archeologist’s trowel and brush sweeping back layer after layer of disused, accumulated clutter until ancient things begin to come to the surface. Thoughts, truths, ethereal and mystical, mysterions left to germinate but buried too deep to feel the warmth of the sun.
And so I dig. I trowel, I brush and sweep and pick and shovel and sort and sift until…like a prospector sifting through the sand and pebbles…I start to see the glitter. The light catches something just right and suddenly everything is different.
The ground begins to shake and tremble, the soil vibrates, jumps, and shifts, and the long-buried, long-forgotten treasures begin to push their way towards the surface. Revelation begins to flow as roots part, as rocks and chunks of knotted weed-choked clumps are pulled aside. A treasure hunter at heart, I lift the artifacts up and begin to arrange them together carefully, piecing and placing the bones this way and that until a shape begins to take form.
The collection I’ve unearthed begins to take on a life of its own, some sort of mystical happening as what was formless begins to coalesce and swirl together into thoughts and words and phrases.
Almost without conscious thought I find that something has come from nothing, that what may have started as bits and pieces and baubles and trinkets and shards of broken this and that have begun to transform themselves into something entirely new, something at once both unimagined and yet also seemingly meant to take form as though predestined.
I can scarce call it my own creation, for it almost seemed to build itself, to move from randomness to inspired order with only the barest gestures of shaping or molding or gentle nudging from me. It is almost as though we have joined in a form of union, a partnership, a gathering of intimate friends who share a bond that requires no words, and yet inspires them to be uttered still.
I sit back in wonder as I gaze at what has come to life before me, and rather than take the credit, I merely consider myself blessed to have been invited and accepted into the process of this creation. What was once buried, only hinted at, haunted whispers of potentiality, has taken shape and form and let out a full-throated roar, leaping off the page to ravage my eyes and my mind with ecstatic wonder.
Entire universes unfold before me, magical kingdoms and prismatic alternate realities that leave me in the stunned silence of amazement. I find myself reading the lines over and over again, as though I am drawing sustenance from the words on the screen…and am starving for more. The words and sentences, the participles and gerunds, adjective and nouns, the turns of phrase that catch me off guard, they all create a hurly burly tumultuous dragon ride that draws me in and propels me ever onward.
And then the wheels begin to slow, the churn abates, and the froth and frenzy stills. The climax has come and gone, the afterglow fading as the narrative begins its breathy sigh of release. The story loosens its last fold, unwinds and uncoils its final few narrative twists…and then there is nothing else. A final salutation like the mournful wave of a lover from a train pulling away from the station, and the story draws to its close.
It is always bittersweet, this parting. Because I am both grateful for having shared in this mystery of creation, and so also reluctant to let it go. So, to soothe and balm this gentle regret, I take trowel and brush, shovel and pick back in hand, setting myself to the work of unearthing the next trove of hidden relics waiting to be released from their bonds of silence.
~ Steven Berven
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