From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, by Terry Tempest Williams:

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.
I write to discover.
I write to uncover.
I write to meet my ghosts.
I write to begin a dialogue.
I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
I write to honor beauty.
I write to correspond with my friends.
I write as a daily act of improvisation.
I write because it creates my composure.
I write against power and for democracy.
I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.
I write in a solitude born out of community.
I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.
I write to the answers that keep me complacent.
I write to remember.
I write to forget.
I write to the music that opens my heart.
I write to forget the pain.
I write to migrating birds and with the hubris of language.
I write as a form of translation.
I write with the patience of melancholy in winter.
I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know.
I write as an act of faith.
I write as an act of slowness.
I write to record what I love in the face of loss.
I write because it makes me less fearful of death.
I write as an exercise of pure joy.
I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt.
I write out of anger and into my passion.
I write from the stillness of night anticipating–always anticipating.
I write to listen.
I write out of silence.
I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around.
I write because of the humor of our condition as humans.
I write because I believe in words.
I write because I do not believe in words.
I write because it is a dance with paradox.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.
I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide.
I write because it is the way I take long walks.
I write as a bow to wilderness.
I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.
I write because as a child I spoke a different language.
I write with a knife carving each word through the generosity of trees.
I write as ritual.
I write because I am not employable.
I write out of my inconsistencies.
I write because then I do not have to speak.
I write with the colors of memory.
I write as a witness to what I have seen.
I write as a witness to what I imagine.
I write by grace and grit.
I write out of indigestion.
I write when I am starving.
I write when I am full.
I write to the dead.
I write out of the body.
I write to put food on the table.
I write on the other side of procrastination.
I write for the children we never had.
I write for the love of ideas.
I write for the surprise of a beautiful sentence.
I write with the belief of alchemists.
I write knowing I will always fail.
I write knowing words always fall short.
I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both understanding and misunderstanding.
I write out of ignorance.
I write by accident.
I write past the embarrassment of exposure…

words are always a gamble, words are splinters of cut glass.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are.

I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.

Photo above taken on a rambly drizzly walk in Tuscany.  Because I also write to remember where I’ve been…