where within me were they?
where within the body of the world did they reside?
where within the fiery core of earth did they live?
* * *
I found twenty-thousand words yesterday, actually
typewritten into documents
in files from which I thought I’d gleaned the
nuggets
and my chapters now feel like a book,
a real live manuscript asking for my gentle,
fastidious care.
* * *
but I do not know with certainty where those words
live
where they lived for all those months and years
waiting, watching, bearing witness to a life
unfolding
so that they could find their moment
to bloom
to open petals, wings, leaves,
to sprout a nub of a branch onto a page of many
pages,
to become the garden or butterflies or plants or
forests of a book
tucked into some crevice
folded into an unseen pocket of my heart
layered into the moments my hands lay inert on the
grass
nourished by the drumbeats of mallets
tempered by desert fasting
honed in the halls of scholarship
wrapped in the blanket of warm sunlight
woven into textiles or fiber arts
moistened by raindrops
disguised as paintings, collages, handmade paper
secreted away like the masks of old
hidden in the iridescent wings of a hummingbird
submerged in the ocean’s crashing waves
hieroglyphics-turned-text
yes, it was a journey to travel so deeply in
to find them there next to thin veins of gold and
stalagmites,
flush with the surface of trilobites, fossilized
arthropods
a spark inside a rock,
life made manifest through symbols…
words…
…a blessed gift!
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2015 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."
