not because anyone asked for it, not because the world hinges on its completion, but because it is the silent kernel at the heart of my being. It is a slow, anxious sedimentation of a need. It is my work, these are my children. I raise these unfinished things, with a sort of contradictory devotion; I want them to be perfect, but I also want them to be alive, to scream with some authentic flaw. I prod them, I beg them, I threaten to abandon them, but ultimately, I return, always, to the desk or the page, and I wait out their fits. I rock them gently, until at last they sleep, or at least, until I can sleep, too.

The work moves through me, I am only the scribe for a voice that is truer and more insistent than my own. I do it every day. I do it, especially on the days when I don’t want to. I do it because it is the only honest response to the particular chemistry of my existence, the only thing that brings the world into a tolerable definition. My work is my only real inheritance. I tend it as others tend their children or their wounds or their garden. I do not expect it to thank me, or to last, or even to be noticed. What matters is the doing: the ritual, the tending, the daily submission to that silent kernel.

And so I do it, over and over, as if the repetition might purify the necessity, as if the necessity might, in turn, redeem the repetition. And so it goes…

© KD.W.Heim