Our job is to ask, What if? And then to invent answers, to face the blank page and wonder. It’s not a job we can give up at this historical moment. Please don’t stop writing because you feel your voice is not being heard. Don’t join the effort to un-diversify American stories, American lives, American voices. Don’t silence yourself. I wrote this for you:
What if there is enough? Time. Love. Food. (Justice?) But this, for today: enough intention, enough will to begin, to continue, to finish. You have it all and more. You do. Desire in plenty and paper and ink. Ideas, oh, they overflow, but there are enough containers, too, if you put them out like buckets all over the house when it rains. Enough rain. Enough ark. Enough room for some single animals to come aboard, too, some non-reproductive pairs, some artists who will populate the earth with beauty and truth.
What if the days unscroll before you, a line of questions, a single, resounding yes (don’t let anyone silence the yes), and you catch the thread and loop it in your needle. Clickity clack, clickity clack. Enough distraction. Enough lure. You knit and drop that yarn line deep into the plenty sea. Pull up lunch and dinner and your next book project, a new idea for a film, a collaborator with a mermaid’s tail and her own red (a high-powered camera for making movies).
What if you wander a bit, paintbrush in hand, a new belief in bounty, and sacred objects fall from the sky? Then would you believe? You take it on faith or you take it on credit. Either way there’s a payment plan option whose sole purpose is to remind you that if you do what you love (or love what you do), there is enough.