Parables speak in cursive.

Rather than walking in straight lines, they loop and lean, and return to themselves. Sometimes I wonder if it’s naive to write and speak this way. I suspect people make fun of it, this extravagance of language and indulgence in metaphor. Yet whenever I read from the masters like Dostoevsky, Hurston, Woolf, and Lispector, the craving intensifies. Their sentences breathe and wander. They dare to feel excessive.

So when I write, I feel free. I dictate and discern to my delight. I play with swirls and hide behind verbs. I paint the picture I choose, and follow the narrative my imagination needs in order to bloom. Up and out it goes until a story unfolds that even I don’t fully understand when or how it began.

Sometimes I wonder what an unnatural thought—one that turns into an idea and then into art—actually looks like. Or feels like.

It often begins with hyper-attention to the particulars. A kind of mania. Everything becomes depersonalized, stripped down to moments and sensations. Instants felt everywhere yet impossible to fully grasp. A frenzy of identifiable unobtainables.

Eventually reality reveals itself. The question is what the fission will yield once illusion splits apart.

A year of self-reflection has forced that question on me repeatedly. What has it actually done? How has it changed my relationship with myself?

The answer is not neat.

It feels more like a multi-layered script. Different personalities imposed along one narrative line. Truth echoing through several halls at once. Sometimes harmony, sometimes contradiction.

There is a constant war between obligation and passion. Between what must be done and what feels alive. And beneath that conflict sits an awareness that is sharp, observant, yet surrounded by ambiguous feelings. 

Life unfolds in layers. Each secret, once unraveled, turns into another knot. And each knot becomes another rung on a ladder leading deeper into understanding.

Understanding of what? Another knot, perhaps.

The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck once wrote:

“Words were sometimes hard to come by as they were intended to convey an experience which evaded comprehension.”

And elsewhere:

“There is only a wine, aged over the course of a lifetime, at the core of my being.”

Maybe that is what all this reflection is doing — aging something within me. Clarifying a taste that once felt scattered. If so, writing is simply the process of artistic pollination. Ideas drift, collide, cross-fertilize. Language carries them from one inner landscape to another until something unexpected grows. Not perfectly organized. Not always understood.

But alive.