Writing is a ritual for me nowadays. I don’t do it unless I have to, but I do it every day. I get into something nice, I put on music. I draw the shades. I sit in a comfortable position, and I pull out the blank page.

The blank page is a canvas for this act of divination. To bring forth into existence what wasn’t before. In a sense, it is much like childbirth.

I realise that is a bit too gendered, so I suppose it’s also like making a sandwich. You add whatever you want and you want to be full at the end of it. All of these unnecessary layers in order to satisfy a base, primal instinct.

Some days I want nothing more than to retire to the mountains and make statues out of fallen trees.

Some days I want to go out into town and write write write everything down and hopefully have something someone can profile me by at the end of it.

I once read somewhere that there were more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there were atoms in the observable universe. That scares me a little, because sometimes every deck feels the same to me. Every suit of cards feels like every other suit of cards, and this is true too for writing.

Whenever I conjure up a thought I fear that I am taking it from the pocket of another and chucking it into my stash. As though a idea could be stolen. As though an emotion could be kidnapped.

Often times I want to be unique, but uniqueness often means solitude, sadness.

It would be far better to be unconcerned with any of this, to fade back into the background with everyone else who lives only to put food in their mouth, chew and swallow.

Note that I don’t say eat. This is deliberate.

To describe anything as something we know is to condemn it to meaningless.

I want to see everything as new. Sacred. Never before seen.

I want to be the explorer in the bushes, watching witchmen dance in a circle around a bonfire under the unending moon.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way.