I have always felt a call to write. Even more than that, I have always known that I must write. When I was very young I was given a leather bound diary, with a small lock and key. I loved the smell of it and I loved the feel of it. I held it in my hands, and turned the empty pages with great care, imagining that the words which would fill them would be infinitely precious and special, imagining the truths that they held would be worthy and good. I pressed my pen hard into the paper, listening to its swishing and scratching. I delighted in the slightly crumpled feel of the pages as I lovingly filled them:

They were the carefully printed sentences of a small child and yet I felt that they somehow betrayed the promise and potential I had felt. The diary was my most cherished and beautiful possession and the words did not do it justice. They were bland and bare and anonymous. I could not understand why they did not speak of me just as truly as the feel and smell of that small book spoke of my dreams, desires and longing. After February my entries were increasingly sparse. Only a few hastily scribbled sentences completed the year.

When I was eight years old I wrote a poem called 'Jocko the Monkey' –

Here Jocko with his little cup,
Runs to pick the pennies up.
Then he brings them to his master,
Back he runs even faster.
Jocko always does his best,
But when he’s tired he has a rest.

My father found the poem in my bedroom, and was convinced that I was a budding genius. He took the poem to work, made numerous copies of it, and handed it out to neighbours and friends. I wanted his approval so much, that I could never bring myself to confess that I had actually copied the first two lines from a colouring-in book. I felt ashamed by my deceit, but it was the knowledge that I could never have written that poem on my own that left me strangely disheartened and diminished. I could never have put words and ideas that were truly mine onto a piece of paper. I did not know how. Something was missing. Some one was missing. I tore that page out of my colouring-in book and quietly threw it out. It was only many years later that I realised how sadly pertinent that poem really was. I was the sad performing monkey, always tied to someone else’s script. My father was the master.

The world, I had learned, could not contain me. My very presence in it assumed my guilt. My face, body, actions, words and feelings were enough to move others to anger or violence. My motives, I was told, were always spiteful or nasty, hateful or vengeful. I was a child whose will must be broken and whose voice must be silenced. I lived in a fragile castle of cards that had to be barricaded and bolstered with counterfeit smiles and dishonest gratitude. It was enough to cry the truth of my tears, for that castle to come tumbling down around me.

By denying me the right to say the words ‘hate’ or ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ it was as though the feelings they gave name to magically ceased to exist. Just as with my clitoris, vagina and anus, there were entire areas of human experience that never intruded into my conscious thoughts. As more and more of my reality was relegated to the unutterable, the shameless, the dirty or the meaningless, I gradually disappeared. One by one the pieces went missing. That counterfeit smile became a counterfeit person. My body kept living in the world, but the ‘I’ that lived through it was gone.

I always envied the people who so readily gave voice to their words or experience. They embodied an ease and a comfort that I could never hope to possess. They moved their bodies and their minds to their own rhythms and that expression was inevitably fitting and apt. Just as I had tried to copy the words from a children’s colouring-in book, so I tried to copy their freedom. But my attempts were only poor imitations, and in my awkwardness and incongruence I was dismissed as rude or aloof, naïve or tactless.

The taunting rhymes of my classmates reached me across the playground:

'Hey Brick!
What are you doing over there?
All you do is sit and stare.'

And as I tried desperately to walk away with the jaunty and easy-going gait of all the other children, I knew I would be forever trapped. There would always be one more life circumstance for which I did not know the rules. One more situation in which I could not find the words.

But in their gibes was truth. I was like a brick. I was rigid and inflexible and hardened. My eyes betrayed nothing and my body was numbed. I went through the motions of someone else’s life, laughing, crying, and doing well in school. But the only impressions that echo forward to me now are of the vast distances that separated me from everyone and everything.

But if those distances left me isolated and remote, they also revealed a wondrous compensation: an abode of silence. I found a peace, depth and stillness in silence that I had never found in the outer world. It echoed through an inner landscape that was immeasurably rich and finely tuned, full of tones, textures, and qualities. In this place of shapes and smell and sense I quietly listened, breathed and flourished. I found a consolation in solitude and spirit and nature. A profoundly infinite music spoke through me in my attempts to play Bach or Mozart. I touched a tree and I saw its light. I sensed the inner fire or inner ice of those around me. I watched before me as the world joined as one, a flower no different to a cloud or to a chair or to a feeling. Here was a language I understood, a language that carried within it the very essence of all the words that could ever truly be mine.

If those around me lived within this place and felt the deeper currents of knowing and significance that I did, it was certainly never acknowledged. When I dared to speak from that place within, my father, as if sensing there was a reality other than his, became furious or violent, my mother distant and dismissive. When I spoke to my friends they laughed uneasily. Just as I was disconnected from the rhythms and reason of the outer world, so they were invariably set apart from the very inner stuff that drove them. At the very least they tried to deny or pretend that reality away. I became tormented by the fact of my own perceptions, longing to find echoes of this most precious abode in the world at large.

In the words of sages and mystics, wise men and gurus, I found hints and traces of this inner world. Here was a refuge far from the uncertainties of my everyday struggles. Here was a community in which I could hope for connection. I would gladly move my body, voice and mind to their postures, chants and meditations, if it meant rising above the pain of my everyday life. I dreamt of soaring towards an infinite inner bliss. I dreamt of enlightenment.

But as their words spoke of emptiness, I knew that my abode was abundantly full. As their words spoke of leaving this world behind, I knew that I only longed to speak my abode through it. As they spoke of the power of techniques and practices, I only felt the power of my own abode dwindle. If their truth was eternal and supreme, it was well hidden behind the fragile egos and artifice of those who so jealously guarded it with their tantrums and trickery. Like the home of my father, my questions, doubts and actions seemed to threaten their very foundations. Here was another hierarchy of words that was to function in the place of my body and mind, my reason and reflection. Here hung another haze of hypocrisy with which they sought to illuminate only themselves. I had tried to speak the words of others and I had dared to speak my own. Neither, it seemed, were right.

With renewed intensity the call to write continued its summons. Like the child who had delighted in the scratching of her pen, I now delighted in the methodical tapping of my fingers on a keyboard and the sight of my words in their ink-jet perfection. I filled up countless journals and notebooks and carefully numbered and dated them. I imagined that one day their pages might form themselves into the book I would write. I imagined their words and sentences recalling me to a lifetime of questing and thought. I could virtually taste the deeper currents of a writer’s life: a hard won word wrestled into place, a crafted sentence so wholly mine, the freedom, exhilaration and solitude.

But although I had written with such passion, conviction and care, when I leafed back through those pages, they may just as well have been empty. For all the promise and hope I had felt, I was once again deeply disheartened. Despite the fact that the descriptive narrative of my childhood had now grown to include all my doubts and personal angst, I was still giving precedence to the words of someone else over my own. I had never been able to fully dispel the feeling that only in someone else’s writing or life would I ever find the words or deeds that were valid and real and true. Interspersed with my endless self-admonitions and the voluminous meanderings of what I did and how I felt, were the very different voices of the various authors I read. Their books were my fodder, and if in their writings I found echoes of myself and my inner abode, I took on their form, their authority and their language. It was only through their ideas, experiences and sentiments that I felt capable or even justified, in expressing my own. I could not deny the suspicion that my vision was but an empty dream.

Like the wallflower at a dance, I continued to dwell uneasily on the fringes and edges. I tried to wear the right clothes, smile the right smile, and talk the right talk. I would gladly have changed my soul itself simply to be included, but my needy desperation spoke much louder than any words I could have uttered. I had already spent far too many hours perched stiffly alone and I knew no other way. I was the hapless onlooker, the begrudging spectator, destined always to be at the sidelines, watching as the carefree dancers twirled away their evenings out on the dance floor of life. I envied them their laughter and play, their easy manner. I longed to join them out there in the middle, dancing to the beat of the main stream trends. I assumed that everything would fall miraculously into place if only I could find a way to be just like them.

In the maps of psychology, psychiatry and therapy I found the paths that would take me there. If my chemicals were imbalanced, if I was suicidal or schizoid, depressed or anxious, I could be labelled, and then treated and managed. If my behaviour was controlling or co-dependent, denying or self-defeating, I could alter, adjust and amend. Here were the rules for life that I had never learnt. Here were the names for things I had long been denied. And as I learnt to utter their powerful sounds, I found a self that was able to speak an adequate countenance into the world around me. I breathed in deeply and felt my feet on the ground. The dance floor beckoned its cheerful welcome. The music throbbed its enticing beat. And I began to hope and dream. Anything, it seemed, was possible.

I tried to find a job like everyone else. But I could never find what it was that I truly wanted to do. I tried to take an interest in movies, shopping, conversation, and colour schemes. But everything was in some way dismally lacking. Bit by bit I noticed that something was always  missing. My inner passion and fire were fading. My solitude was now strangely unsettling. The call to write had become so faint as to be almost imperceptible.  The everyday world of body and feelings was oddly unsatisfying. I had tried to live my life in the middle, dancing to the rhythms of societal tunes but the life it offered was pointless and barren. Like the child that I was, I was still bending myself to the scripts of others. I was still the sad performing monkey. If my father was no longer my master, it was now the countless techniques, therapies and medicines that I tried.

When I stepped out onto that dance floor I had not expected that the door connecting me to my most precious abode would close behind me. Some of the methods had disdainfully tapped on the door, some merely dutifully. But the door had remained firmly closed. Others had ever so briefly held it open, allowing me a momentary glimpse inside, but it was just as soon fastened firmly shut. By all means I could speak of spirit, mystery and dreams, paying a scant lip service to the hints and tastes of other places, but only ever in the context of a life well lived in the consensus world.

I had assumed that by living in that world and speaking their languages, I would find a home in which I could grow and prosper, but the words I had spoken were hollow ones, and the world I had found was paper-thin. Out on that floor I was like an actor who lives their life for the stage. I performed the roles of drama and pathos, comedy and farce to the eager and appreciative audience. But when I stepped out of the glare of the spotlights, the entire production of my off-stage life, my feelings, my thoughts and my actions, was still nevertheless fixed by the tone of my latest review.

In speaking the words of others I could never escape from the critics. I was always bracing myself for the inevitable censure, always wondering, 'how did I do?' Without any words that were truly mine, the world itself would never be mine. It would always belong to others. As I struggled to inhabit the body of language, so I struggled to inhabit the body of the world. I was wordless and I was worldless. Adrift in a world in which I did not belong.

I had always trusted that somewhere I would find the secret of my existence: an authentic and meaningful world in which I might recover everything that would make me whole. It was like a task that I had been given long before I was born, and a task I would strive to complete long after I had died. With an urgency and a determination I have never been able to rationally comprehend I had looked for that secret everywhere: on quiet retreats, in the promises of nirvanic bliss, in the assurances of science and rationalism, in the compensations of material comfort, and in the privilege of therapeutic associations.

As I looked about me now there was nothing to grasp onto. I was exhausted. I had run out of alternatives. And I had run out of time. From my vantage point I only saw a vast and uncompromising hopelessness. It was a death of everything I thought I knew. A death of everything I had hoped was possible. Whether it was a real death or a living death, was beside the point. To me they were the same. It was the very cessation of my existence in all its breadth.

To all appearances my body continued in its day to day bearing, but within it I now sat with my arms tightly wrapped about my knees and my head held low. There was no justification for taking even one more step. No justification for speaking one more word. There was only nothingness. All I could do was go down into my depths, sinking to the very end of the confrontation with myself, and looking death surely and squarely in the face.

And it was only when I did so, that I finally understood that it would always be far easier to follow death, and indeed that I had followed death my whole life. I had died when I had been unable to fulfil the promise of my beautiful diary. I had died when I had copied two lines from a colouring-in book. I had died when I had been unable to speak the words of my abode. I had died every time I had looked to someone else or something else to define who I was. I had died every time I had lived out the words of others.

And I had died all those times, because I had not heard and truly heeded the call of my life. It had been right in front of me the entire time. It was a call to recover everything that would make me whole. Like a fine umbilical cord it had always assured a link to the very abode of my being, spirit or inner self. And though at times that link was stretched to a brittle thinness, it had endured. Over and over it had called out, one small voice of the immense magic that hummed away underneath a life I had thought was ultimately meaningless. Like my dearest friend or most beloved and faithful ally, it had stood by my side, ready to point out the way, if only I was able to listen. It had not deserted me. And it never would. And faced with what now I knew, I realised that I must make a choice, and indeed could make a choice: to continue to follow that death or to truly live.

I have always found a profound solace in music and art. I have delighted in nature and planting trees. I have revelled in the simple innocence of animals. I have loved to walk and to pitch a tent. These things have given me great joy and at times also great contest, but none of them have had the power of my call to life. For ironically, if my call to life is my greatest ally, it must also be true that it is my greatest challenge. It is within its scope as that which I deem utterly impossible, unworkable and illogical, that it contains its immense power to call me to life.

And for me that call to life has always been the call to write.

It is only because I did not have words, and because I could never have spoken or written words which were truly mine, that it was so necessary for me to find expression through words. Because the words had been denied me, it would only ever be through words that I could truly become one. Only through words would I ever find the path that would lead me to live a complete and fulfilled life in both the inner and outer worlds. If I truly wanted to live, I must write.

Over and over I had tried to deny that call. My everyday mind with its stories of my personal history, assumed that I was weak, incapable, and disordered and as such also believed that it was only ever other people who were competent or qualified enough to call themselves writers. Even now as I sit down to write I feel a remnant discomfort. I still have the suspicion that ultimately I may well be a fraud, and that only in another’s writing will I ever find the words that are powerful or articulate enough to dignify a sheet of paper. I still feel the urge to search through the words of others for the ideas and sentiments that best match my own. I still feel the urge to only speak out loud in the words and deeds that belong to others. But I now know that if I give precedence to the words of someone else over my own, I will inevitably come away depleted. A small piece of myself would be given away.

To truly write I must give voice to my own most unique and intimate awareness. I must allow my inner world to inform and speak itself into the outer world. I must once again connect with the world of my abode, but rather than merely residing in that abode, and thereby removing myself from the realities of the everyday world, I must allow its presence and power to speak through me in the profound creative potentialities which are its essence. I must deeply listen to this inner world, for it is within its rich tapestry of silence that I can begin to allow its voices to quietly and humbly whisper their entrance.

At first I may not recognise them as real voices, for they do not speak in a perfect grammar and syntax. Nor do they speak in the audible tones that we have come to believe are the only language practicable. Rather, I behold them in subtle waves of meaning, in tones and echoes of inner sounds, and in patterns and textures of sensual experience that caress the edges of my body and mind. They are not some airy and angelic voices singing out from a disembodied spiritual paradise. Rather they are the very language of a qualitative and profoundly real dimension in which we are all utterly immersed. And it is only because we are so completely one with it, that we so readily take it for granted, ignore it or become possessed by its outward manifestations. Like the air that we breathe, we may only realise its value and significance when that air is polluted and can no longer comfortably sustain us or we are unwell and unable to breathe it in for ourselves.

As I sit to write, I unfold in silence a space in which to hear these voices. I attend to them, not with my ears, but rather with my entire being and body. I heed all that is there, in that place before words: the streaming of felt sense and meaning, and the unfurling of image and form. And as I continue to hearken to the language of my abode, it wondrously shifts, coalesces, transforms and then gives birth into the mosaic of words, sentences and meanings that appear on this page.

In a flood of inspiration or after a lengthy and at times difficult labour the words will emerge. I may feel impatient and anxious, as I await their arrival. I may be convinced they will never come. And so I may wish to push at them, prod them, or jab them crudely and carelessly into place. But I know that the words and sentences that result would be premature or ill-formed. I may once again long for the words of others to force me into action. But I know that pallid and lifeless, they would be born of another’s blood. I must wait, feeling the life that is imminent. Feeling its growing form. Bending to its weight. Moving to its drift and flow. The words that are mine will be born. And by the life that speaks through them and by the life that speaks through me as I write them, I know they will be true.

Countless times each day I make use of words, not only when I write but also when I speak. But it is only now that I have begun to fully comprehend their abundant and gloriously breathtaking power. I am their author now, and with each new letter, with each new word and sentence I utter, I can feel the walls, boundaries and limitations that I have constructed around and within me, breaking down. I can feel all that is inwardly real and vital flowing into the world, and so joining together with it, in a free and limitless exchange.

The call to write was wise in its persistence and far-reaching in its consequences, for just as I now sit here and find myself ‘wording’, so in my life as a whole am I beginning to ‘world’. Just as I have ‘spoken’ these words, so am I truly beginning to ‘speak’ my whole self with a previously unimaginable sense of clarity and determination into a world that in the past has so completely overwhelmed me. It is the dance of my words that are calling me always to life.

And so I must write ….