Returning to the Page...

It has been longer than I realized...

Months spent in the practical machinery of life—selling one home, buying another, crossing provincial lines, sorting papers that seemed to multiply overnight, and slowly unpacking boxes in a place that did not yet feel like mine. Survival mode has its own language: lists, appointments, signatures, measurements. The muse, understandably, grew quiet. Words that once arrived unbidden now waited, patient but distant, while I tended the necessary upheaval of change.

A major uprooting does something curious to the way language moves inside us. In the thick of it, sentences feel heavy, almost reluctant. The mind is occupied with logistics and thresholds; the softer currents of thought are pushed downstream. Ideas arrive in fragments, or not at all. There is a kind of creative hush that settles when the outer world demands so much of our attention. I learned again that the page cannot always compete with the urgency of a moving truck or the weight of unfamiliar keys.

And yet.

This week I found myself reaching for my laptop for the first time without a to-do list waiting. Something shifted. Not dramatically, not with fanfare—just a quiet recognition. The muse had not left; she had simply been waiting for the room to be made ready.

There is a particular joy in this moment of return. It is not the rush of inspiration I once chased, but a softer permission: to sit again, to listen, to let a single word rise and see whether it wants to become a sentence. After the long season of practical survival, the page feels less like a demand and more like a homecoming.

I am writing this now from the other side of the upheaval, still unpacking in small ways, still learning the light in these new rooms. The words are arriving differently—slower, perhaps, but with a steadiness that feels earned. They no longer have to shout over the noise of transition. 

They simply need space.And space, at last, is what I have begun to give them.

~ your in ink ML