Leaves In My Hair, Ink On My Hands
Welcome to the Inkwell, fellow wanderer.
For most of my life, I’ve written in a vacuum–raising stories and poems like fragile, vulnerable children, only to strand them in isolation. My words filled an endless heap of tattered spiral notebooks, ink-smudged journals, drafts buried in drawers, their voices no louder than a whisper. I always wrote because I knew no other way. The words refused to stay unwritten. I wrote to order my thoughts, process my feelings, heal my wounds. My words, my tender little children, were to be held close and shielded from the world.
And shield them I did. But in doing so, I had also trapped them. I kept them from breathing, from experiencing the gaze of unfamiliar eyes, from knowing what it is to be seen and heard.
Creative writing is an outlet. The word itself, outlet, implies it was never meant to stay hidden. Art should engage and evoke. Art is not just expression, but connection.
Art, at its root, is a conversation — between the maker and the world, between the moment and the memory, between me and you. To write is to open a channel. To distill moods, ideas, longing, and joy into something you, the reader, can hold. Can translate. Can maybe even feel in your own bones.
If we’re lucky, what I write will meet you in a place you recognize — even if you’ve never been there before.
That same place lives in the garden. In bare feet pressed into earth, dirt under my fingernails, and twigs tangled in my hair. In the green-stained knees and the ache of work that somehow feeds the soul. That earthy, real magic — the kind that doesn’t need explanation — is the same current I tap into when I let go of all that binds me to the noise and the scroll, and simply write.
Always, my left pinky tells the tale: ink-smudged, a small sacrifice to the page from a lifelong left-handed writer. A quiet badge of devotion.
So this is me stepping out of the vacuum. Opening the door. Starting the conversation.
Welcome to The Evergreen Inkwell.
Let’s speak in soil and story. Let’s share the good ink.
Love,
Karin (with an eye)
