They say write what you know. But it’s a hard thing to do. First, we rarely know what we know. Or rather, there’s so much we think we know but don’t. And second…how do you explain the flutter in your ribcage when you start a new story? How do you describe the taste of a memory so old you don’t remember when you first acquired it?

Sometimes you do write what you know, though no one believes you’ve fought dragons. You have. Several of them. Seems there’s one knocking on your door every few years or you stumble across them as you canvas uncharted territories. You made friends with a few of them, too. No one trusts that you hear the whispered stories of trees. It must only be the breeze you’re talking about. Never mind that trees have the best stories—the oldest stories—and dearly love to gossip. Fewer still understand that when you write of mixing hot water with rosemary slivers and chamomile heads, you aren’t just brewing a cup of tea, but concocting a healing spell to mend bruised hearts and tired bodies. 

Once in a while, someone hears your truth, like a distant moonlit howl. So that when you say a pair of cowboy boots—over 15 years old and thrice mended—are the living history of a woman learning to stand on her own, they see pieces of your soul woven into the leather soles. Others will bend and distort this and see only that you have a pair of shoes or that perhaps you like to two-step. In the end, it hardly matters. You can’t anticipate what others might see when you tear off a piece of yourself as if from a loaf of bread, and invite them to taste it.

Sunday, I read a book (which means: Sunday, I read a book).

When I talk about the stories locked in my veins—some passed on to me, some all my own—it will show up as a smattering of words on a page. They may not know the press of these stories, like so many microscopic seeds, against my arteries. And when I say I’ve taken a long walk through my neighborhood, I’ve really just returned from a long journey in which I fought my way through an ancient labyrinth in a faraway land so as to find answers to secret questions only the spirit in the middle of the maze can answer.

Yesterday I bargained for some extra luck from a wood sprite who was in dire need of a handful of acorns. (Loosely translated: I was the one in a pinch and borrowed some magic from someone who owed me a favor...and wasn't opposed to my sweetening the deal with some hard-to-find nuts. Real magic, conjured magic—your own magic—takes time to build and I was at a deficit from one too many blows to the spirit.) 

So this is my truth. More or less. I once had high tea with a giant. We dined across a large slab of granite in a wide open field, as was the custom in his land. Although when I write this, many will only see a young student clutching a cardboard coffee cup, sitting next to a future mentor on a cold bench near a duck pond between classes.

Tonight, I'll dream. Or live. Depending on how you want to read it. Who's to say we can tell the difference between one or the other? Half the time people think I'm dancing through life, when really my footsteps are meticulous, carefully kissing the earth in slow, dramatic presses of heel to toes, heel to toes. That's the only way to walk. The only way to taste things growing just under the surface.

This I write. This I know. Mostly. Kind of.