Time is passing as we speak, as your eyes wander this line. 

Or not. Are we all in a foreverness, tongues poised to taste the occasional spectacular minute infraction of the lie? 

For years, I kept a journal. From the age of eleven or twelve. I turned sixty-four several days ago. I don’t keep a journal in the way I once did, as if my life depended on it. I’ve pierced that lie. 

But what to do with the fallout, because it’s all, or most of it, is still there, here, in the world by which we are touched. 

At the same time, I realize that journals kept with an abundance of freedom may be more important than the stories, the novel, the poems, the essays. The intention was only this: to walk along beside the life, making a braid. 

I’ve chosen to turn words into something else, something new, a visual palimpsest, the layers yielding to time through the process of erasure.

What, after all, may be revealed?

In the process, I’ve had no control over the way hidden layers are revealed. I don’t know which words will show, which will remain hidden in the rock face of the image.

I hope to be surprised, and hope not to be embarrassed. But this is a private project, offered to a public. Embarrassment comes with the territory. So be it. I hope not to expose anyone else’s nakedness.

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A moment I had not expected to live, a time in history so desperate for the right words that none feel adequate.

And so I throw them out to sea, bury them in the earth, beneath sand, cover them with bark, fly them skyward with the hope that in letting them go, leaving words to go back where they came from, they may emerge with the power to touch us differently, to make meaning in entirely new ways.