From The Vault: For The Practice

I'm going to be releasing a few posts here and there that I've written over the years but have not published. They aren't profound; they're just my words, and I feel like a blog on a website that centers around ideas coming to life should highlight ideas, in whatever stage and form they are, for readers to experience.

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This one comes from early August, 2013, on a plane back from some conference I was doing. Enjoy this brief piece, "For The Practice."

This morning I write just for the practice.

I am hunched over a tray table in a window seat, looking down over the expanse of a flat Texas. There's no burning thought to flesh out with ink, no idea lobbed onto my heart that's bursting to get out. My only thoughts, really, are for my boys, all three of them. I've been away for three and a half days and that's too long this time. So I think of them and write for practice. It reminds me that even the practice is profound.

I think of anything while I write, and anything can turn into something. That's a hope unto itself, that my wandering will lead places, and that those may have been the right places all along. So it is with prayer, with faith, with all the disciplines. I think of many other things, but I "do" for the practice. Practice can strengthen spirit even when flesh skips the gym, and today I need the practice of a moving pen following an ancient invisible map of curls and loops and lines and punctuation, in the hope of happening onto an unexplored meadow or a craggy mountain. The mundane ushers in the magical. Practice can hold the candle under passion.

And I write from memory in my soft tissue and muscles, this grey matter that can interpret infinite color and plots of fantasies. Pen, paper, half a heart, and letters. They make stuff of spirit sing. And I sit in this airplane somewhere between Dallas and Atlanta with no other thought but for my family, yet painting rainbows in my brain, just for the practice.