Why Do You Write?

One day as I was going through an old journal, I read:
Sit, listen, hear the song of your soul. Always there. Always singing. Always waiting. Patient. Until the end of time. You. You. Only one you. Reach in now, through the channel of your art….”
 This was my journal. Clearly I had written these words, but I had no memory of them, and my first thought was “Who wrote this?” Its wisdom filled my heart and its gentle guidance calmed me. I knew the words were a glimpse into the true offerings of the Muse and the gift of my writing. I thought, yes, it’s true, I have reached into myself and found myself in unexpected ways through my writing, found truths about myself and my life that would have remained hidden otherwise. Through my stories and my characters I have heard the song of my soul.
 But how to keep the channel open? How not to forget, as I have done time and again, that my writing is a pathway to my truest self, often so different from the busy self that runs my day to day life?
 It’s not easy and, I realized, it’s exquisitely easy at the same time. A maddening, mystifying paradox, whose truth brings me to the core of why I write, whose revelations I don’t always understand or, more importantly don’t always want to understand. And yet if I did, if I embraced the song of my soul that I hear through my writing, might my writing and my life flow from a calmer, richer place?