by Cheryl Bruedigam

by Cheryl Bruedigam

Virginia Woolf 1901

She stirred my muses. I could write just like her, I knew I could, if only I would think on it, remove myself and my misgivings from the path of the pen thereby releasing its lightening swift approach to the paper, shedding light on the multitude of hidden words and thoughts, judgments and curiosities that continually flow through the mind. I knew at that moment, that I was indeed the writer I had been born to be.  Freeing the pen of my mind that had been stifled by the tatter of commercial publications and the limited view of those to whom they are marketed. The muses came alive with wit and wonder at the onset, freeing with fire an imaginative lurch that sprang forth from the well near-buried in the rubble of life. Who knew the mercies that heaven lay upon us when once we free the architecture of being, when once we loose the time-honored soul? O the sweet pleasure of delight in the freedom of purified thought whereby we regale in our own innermost being, that which rings truer than any salt of the earth, for it is the very essence of who we are. A lactatious flow of honeyed dew with the rising of the morn, begets our very core to rise with it and through it, we are reborn.

I am astounded as I play with light in the once darkened corners of my mind. Would I that I could share this with her and tell her what her own words have brought to me there in the recesses once dark and in despair. But I think not for she would cringe at the compliment, ever-fearing that she was not worthy as she may have on oft so many occasions for it was her undoing. I shall though give her hope that the word and the spirit are indeed one and that she feared without wise for so much is not taught but understood, that in all things we might find wonder and be of pride to share, that we might wholly inspire others as we set forth bringing light to their own darkened corners. If only she could have seen her own light, she too would have felt the explosion of the inner coil to freedom from the web-like existence of life and n’er again would she have doubted her exceptional journey and the deliverance of its passage to others. Hats off to her as we sing the praises of a new moon and era for what we once were is to whence we return and it is within this return that we then see the true light that guides us to set forth and move forward in our destined direction. Some will never see, others will turn back; she gave up midstream literally drowning in the waters of life. And it is here where we find her in the darkened waters that we rescue the residue of something once grand and illuminated, destined to ever-shine through the souls moving forward. Destiny is a lady-in-waiting so-to-speak and she beckons to us through the voice of those long past that we too might take up the pen or the microphone or by whatever means and carry forth the torch of everlasting genius.

And there then lies the question of what does one do with this sacred paradox of lament and flooding enthusiasm? It is a springboard forth, into the new and unchartered depths of a retracted mind-pen, now open to forge ahead with confidence and dignity while in respite of a world confused of hope and light, that in this respite, a renaissance of light will again be allowed to shine.


Adeline Virginia Woolf (/ˈwʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Read her famed essay, A Room of One's Own.

copyright Cheryl Bruedigam 2014