I’ve started hearing voices again.

I’ve started hearing voices again.

Now, before you call the padded-room brigade, this is a good thing.

In the time and space I’ve had since quitting my full-time job at the end of October (despite the roar of negative thoughts and virulent self-questioning), I have begun to find space behind the thinking. And it is within this space that I’ve always germinated the seeds of my writing.

When I explain it in person, I raise my arm behind my head, and wave my hand in the general direction of “back here.” I tell them that it’s like there’s a room back behind my head, where the ideas start to percolate. They marinate, germinate, ruminate, and when they’re ready -- the indicator popping up like the thermometer in a slab of roasting turkey -- I open the door and chase them onto a page.

By the time the door opens, they’re pretty fully-formed. But they need the time and space and freedom to sit back there, talking amongst themselves, these ideas. I can hear them back there, murmuring. I begin to hear bits of phrases. The sense of a topic, a genre.

My waking thoughts start to curve in that direction; they start to gather information that all funnels to the same place. I collect these bits and feed them like coal into a furnace.

It’s partly, I know, the time and space that I have to think, not crowded with the demands of a 40-hour job. But it’s also working on “To Kill a Mockingbird,” reading the book at night, becoming immersed the language. (I used the word “rightly” twice in a recent blog; I become a sponge and a regurgitant of what I feed my brain.) It’s also watching Netflix's “Peaky Blinders,” and being stunned by the cinematography, the bold and sweeping camera work inspiring me, reminding me of the nuance and exaltation of art.

It’s listening to NPR, and a man's purple report of bison grazing in Canada, when the song of birds “split the silence like a candle,” and it became “the end of a day that started as a morning.”

I begin to collect these images, words, sensations like a magpie, not knowing what will be useful, but shoveling it all in anyway, trusting my process of alchemy.

I’ve begun hearing voices again. And this brings me hope.