“Once the work is up and under way, once the world is breathing, you have to surrender to it: to its rhythms, to its intentions, to its ugliness, sometimes; to its beauty, others. Sometimes this surrender, which is the second state of creation, feels perilous. You float in a murky place for long periods, waiting for the sense of things to show itself. Doubt devours you. This time, you think, there’s nothing there to bear you up. You’re just going to sink, while these illusions you created watch you go down. And then, miraculously, something begins to happen. The story begins to move before you, like a pageant. Still surrendering, you describe it. If you’re lucky, there are days when this other world is so familiar to you that you can operate in that journalistic fashion I described before and simply report what you see. Some days too when you have to wait, not pushing too hard, not demanding that the sense of all this show itself before it wants to; listening, deeply; watching, deeply.”