I wrote my first poem on a bed sheet when I was twelve. I’d already been in the writing game for a few years at that point, dreaming up fantastic worlds and little rhymes to occupy my brain through the drudgery and terror of elementary school. But my mother always insisted that I write down the bizarre things I shared with her, and on that winter evening I just happened to find a black ink pen in my tangled blankets and finally put poem (words) to cloth. 

I now look back and say, “Yes, that’s the moment when I became a poet, a writer.” However, at the time I thought nothing of it, save the thrill it wrapped me in and the curious way in which, when finished, my chronic child’s insomnia vanished. 

And since then, with my passion for reading material of all sorts, I’ve pursued the life of a writer. 

And since then, with periods of fog and doubt, I’ve forgotten that I am a writer at all. 

Old sages spoke of the mountain too close to be seen, and that’s what writing has often been for me. All my varied interests (music, art, philosophy), spread me too thin in the mountain air and I forget. My scatterbrained interdisciplinary nature coupled with all the traveling and teaching, living and experiencing (for the sake of having something to say and write) have many times left me lost in a nook or cranny of the mountain and unaware of the mountain itself, beneath my feet.

And yet these distractions I have handed to myself, and in the name of writing to boot. It is a strange and paradoxical artcraft, writing. The things you do–your life–are fuel for the fire and also at the same time the heat that keeps you from the kitchen. The groans and pouts of daily life are there for you to write about and to keep you from writing about them. 

And yet the page is always there: torture and salvation, blinding white fog and gentle touch on the eyes, reminder. “The wife is gone out and I’m left home bored. What to do? Oh yes. I forgot. I’m a writer. Maybe I should write something.” 

Two old phrases from those old sages to close: tat tvam asi, “that art thou” and gnothi sauton ”know thyself”.  What are you? A writer. What do you do? You write.