And So She Wrote

'Why do you spend so much time writing? Waste of time and money, if you ask me.'

'Ah, but I didn't ask you.'

And so, she wrote ... 

<<<~~~>>>

She had lived a long and well-traveled life:
blessed with excellent health,
grounded with faith,
and above all,
nurtured with an abundance of love.

Yet, she was no stranger to
harsh criticism,
cold betrayal, 
enduring grief.

They, too, had been frequent visitors to her world.

She was keenly aware of the
     painful realities beyond her known acres of comfort:

Her heart ached
     for those suffering
     from the blasphemous realities and acute indignities
     of the world's tyrannies.
She was sickened
     by the overwhelming existence
     of poverty’s despair, crippling fear,
     and the wanton destruction of Mother Earth.
And she rebelled
      at the notion that one man alone was responsible
      for the escalating acts of hatred and civil chaos 
      threatening to implode her beloved America.

But she often felt helpless in her ability
     to make sense of the strident cacophony,
     to reason with those unwilling to listen,
     to exact lasting social change by her own actions.

And so, she wrote.

She wrote not for fame or recognition, but
to create a semblance of beauty and peace,
to inspire and heal,
to leave a legacy of memories for her loved ones,
to make sense of a world that was becoming increasingly senseless.

Long into the late hours of equally long days, she wrote
of what she knew,
of what she loved,
of what touched her heart:

        celebrating where the first blush of trillium
                  burst into a riotous carpet of soft ermine wonder each spring
                  along awakening woodland pathways,
        sharing where a red fox
                  was raising her five pups
                  in an abandoned woodchuck burrow
                  beyond the meadow by Miller's Pond,
        describing where the most succulent wild blackberries
                  grew profusely, glittering like onyx gemstones,
                  in a hidden patch behind McNeil's dilapidated barn.
            
As she wrote, she often wept
for what once was,
for what need not have been,
for what would never be again …

But she wrote,
and in choosing to do so,
she hoped that
others' hearts were opened
to possibilities.

In choosing to do so,
she found purpose,
which gave her great peace,
and that was reason enough 
for why she wrote ...