From a Single Word to Breathing Life...

 It usually begins the same way.

A word.
Just one.
Sometimes it arrives uninvited—sharp, insistent, flickering in the half-light of half-awake thought. Sometimes I have to hunt for it, turning over stones in the mind until something small and alive scurries out.
From that word, a sentence cautiously takes shape.
Tentative.
Testing its own weight on the page like a fawn finding its legs.
Then—almost without permission—a paragraph emerges.
Suddenly there is momentum.
Thoughts that lived curled tight inside my skull begin to uncurl, stretch, reveal their true size and color. They spill forward in a current I don’t entirely control.
For me, it begins here:
in the private miracle of something internal becoming external.
A quote.
A poem that finds its meter.
A post that expands ever further.
Sometimes the thing grows larger than I expected and a book might be birthed.
It expands, it contracts.
It breathes.
Long languid sentences followed by short sharp ones—like a heartbeat finding its rhythm after sprinting uphill.
The process only works when I let it stay fluid.When I force it, the words turn wooden.
When I over-polish too early, the life drains out.
But when I allow the shallows and the depths to coexist—when I trust the awkward sentence, the imperfect image, the too-long silence on the page—something truer begins to surface.
To write is not to decorate thought.
It is to give breath to what is already breathing inside us.It is the slow, stubborn, occasionally ecstatic act of moving the invisible into the visible.
One word at a time.
And if we’re lucky—if we stay out of our own way long enough—
what began as a whisper in the mind
ends up sitting quietly on someone else’s screen
saying, without ever saying it directly:“You were not the only one feeling this.”
So I keep writing.
Even when it’s messy.
Even when it’s small.
Especially when it’s small.Because that’s how everything large once began.
~ yours in ink ML