because we can't control most things, because writing is my terra firma

How rarely we control the world, or anything in it.  How mostly futile it is to say, I want this thus, and I want it now.  How often we learn (it doesn't matter our age, it doesn't matter our past) that the only things we can control are those that we raise up with our own hands and sometimes (not always) our hearts.

So that yesterday I cleared the weeds from the lawn's front edge and changed that patch of earth.  So that afterwards I came in the house and sat on the couch, my pinched-nerve leg wrapped in heat and a pink book of blank pages on my lap.  I wrote the first 350 words of a new book that will soon take me to Florence.  I tunneled toward my consuming love affair with words.

Why do you keep writing? I'm asked.

Because writing, I say, is my terra firma.