I expect she means 'by hand.' This Deena Metzger whom I have decided to trust. "Write anything," she says. "Keeping a journal isn't so difficult; beginning to keep it is the challenge. It has always been easy for me to keep a travel journal. When I am in a foreign place, I appreciate the journals familiar presence. It is the close friend to whom I can confide everything and convey my experience. One way to start a regular journal is to imagine that you are traveling. For the first weeks, follow this sequence: Imagine that your daily life is occurring in a foreign country. Carry a journal with you wherever you go and write in it whenever you have a moment--at the beginning or end of the day, on line in a supermarket, waiting for transportation, in a restaurant, and so on. Write anything and everything: snatches of conversations, observations, concerns, dreams, plans, lines of poems, letters, newspaper headlines. Allow yourself to record anything and everything without judging appropriateness or meaning." She is so like me, somehow, this Deena woman. She gives me the advice I would give myself, if I listened to myself deeply enough. She is kind, soft-spoken, with words that are at the sametime powerful and gentle. She is a poet. I like her. I like what she has to say. She speaks to the innermost wildnesses in me that most need the perfect word. She happens to have the perfect words, the ones I need to hear.

And so here I am, not at the computer, but at this book, so lovely I almost fear to write in it or to carry it about, certain I will harm it by using it in the way it was surely meant to be used. Yet here I am, because Deena Metzger said so. And I am beginning to believe I am ready. Ready to write again. I am entering a few online writing groups and it appears that I really might be reading this Metzger woman's book Writing For Your Life and doing the exercises (following her advice). I think I am desperate to write. I think that there is a small animal inside of me calwing at my throat trying to climb up out of me. It is the hunger fed with fear and confusion. Every time I lay down the pen, I do not know how to pick it up again. What is the mechanism? What musles must be engaged in what order? What complex incantation is required? WHAT DO I SAY? I feel that I should say momentous, important things only. What if the truth of thematter is that I spent much of the morning and early afternoon sleeping and then rolled off the bed to sit in front of the computer looking for a more sensible job while carrying around the usual vague sense of unease--that I've made a mess of my little life, and the sweet gift of potential that I was once upon a time given. None of that will stop the war. Or save a women's right to choose. Or bring joy to lives foull of pain and struggle or break apart the prison industrial complex or even pay the bills. I am afraid that the truth is I'm just lazy and have ruined everything about my life and future. But, of course, that can't be so. I'm not so far gone as to really believe all of that self-induced apocolypse. I'm only twenty-three. How far gone a conclusion can my life really be?

So, I re-emerge. I hold Deena Metzger's hand. I hold onto myself. And to this fancy notebook. The desperate animal leaping around in my chest is soothed by every word I lay down, even though they haven't stopped Bush's insane tyranny. This is the way.

This is the way I love myself.