In the filling moon’s light, inner tides churn with dramatic ebbs and flows. Yesterday words bubbled, curled and crashed in waves, presenting three posts to the Archives. Whoa. That’s a first.

It goes like this, I’ll tell you.

A rush of inspiration to dig deep to the root of feeling, then share it with as much candor as I can. The Publish button clicked, my words echoing out into the world.

It’s only later – maybe I’m driving in the car – that all those syllables seem like scattered sea spray. Or seeds caught on a sudden gust of wind. Copious and aimless, it all will feel too much of me. And so will go the inner recanting. I become the fisherman reeling in the line. I want to make a U-turn to the inside, go silent.

If I’m living yes and no, walking a tideline that shifts in dramatic highs and lows, where is the center where I can steady? Is it in words or silence? Or in some space between?

Whether casting lines or reeling in, my heart seems to stay stitched on my sleeve.

And case in point, I wasn’t going to tell you this. But it arises like a surge of a rogue wave.

About the heart. The one inside. The one he listened to with his ear against my chest when we first met. “It sounds like a little bell.”

Last night he says the beat has changed. “It sounds different. It’s deeper, more full. There’s more life in it now. Not like that little bell before.”

See, I was going to be silent about the swells that move these inner beats. The pumping of a sweetness found with a man who will listen to my heart beat and tell me what he hears.

That’s the casting.

Now I’m reeling in.