You Gotta Imagine What's Never Been.

Probably One Or Two Moments In Your Whole Life You Will Hear A Dark Whispering Spirit, A Voice Coming From The Center Of Things. It Will Have Blades For Lips And Will Not Stop Until It Speaks The One Secret Thing At The Heart Of It All. Kneeling On The Floor, Unable To Stop Shuddering, I Heard It Plainly. It Said, You Are Unlovable.

There's Release In Knowing The Truth No Matter How Anguishing It Is. You Come Finally To The Irreducible Thing, And There's Nothing Left To Do But Pick It Up And Hold It. Then, At Last, You Can Enter The Severe Mercy Of Acceptance.

Finally, I Began To Write About Becoming An Older Woman And The Trepidation It Stirred. The Small, Telling "betrayals" Of My Body. The Stalled, Eerie Stillness In My Writing, Accompanied By An Ache For Some Unlived Destiny. I Wrote About The Raw, Unsettled Feelings Coursing Through Me, The Need To Divest And Relocate, The Urge To Radically Simplify And Distill Life Into A New, Unknown Meaning.

My Children Have Always Existed At The Deepest Center Of Me, Right There In The Heart/hearth, But I Struggled With The Powerful Demands Of Motherhood, Chafing Sometimes At The Way They Pulled Me Away From My Separate Life, Not Knowing How To Balance Them With My Unwieldy Need For Solitude And Creative Expression.

To Fashion An Inner Story Of Our Pain Carries Us Into The Heart Of It, Which Is Where Rebirth Inevitably Occurs.