There's a magic to silencing your mind, to steadying your soul -- a science, a process by which you tune out the cluster of daily thoughts, mute the bad energy, settle into only your own. I'm terrible at it. In the fast-pace of the everyday, I fail at slowing it down.

Consistently, it's in words that I find the most solace, the meditation I strive for yet can't seem to achieve on the yoga mat (I will some day; I'm on it!). Whether I'm reading them off the page of a book or bringing them to life myself, they bind my thoughts, center my core and allow me to focus.

It's in the depth of stories, melodic prose, complicated verses and simple yet honest words that I find "it" -- that intangible calmness, if only for as long as the length of the passage at hand. I'm there, in there, by myself.

I have always known this to be true: when I read and wrote solely in Spanish, when I found my English voice, when I read and read and read just so that I could be the best spoken and the most well-read among the English natives. I read so that I could escape, when it was impossible to vacation; so that I could understand, when I was having a hard time making things make sense; so that I could truly connect when all to often I'd forgotten how.

It's by way of such words that I find myself. Always, steadily back into them I go.