Incipit

I was born out of the Word, without ritual nor sermon. I was born out of those white afternoons of withdrawal where, in the middle of the isle of time, sitting alone at my desk, I would jot down what cannot be said nor silenced. Eyes shut, haunted by words, I would take the plunge into the depths of myself, all ears to whatsoever tries, on the edge of flesh, to stutter its way to articulate language through the spirit. 

My thoughts would either curl themselves into a ball like little wild foxes or drift away the way flocks of herons cross the rambling skies and vanish away to leave lines of ink of a signature. They would head far away. I would loose them. I would get lost along with them. And thus, I would retreat until manifesting a different reality into another world, where new thoughts – I could never have suspected they could be mine – would arise. Words do protect me as much as they do unconceal me. Because of them and thanks to them at the same, I can experience both Unity and Separation. Words separate me from the tree, and yet bring/lead me back to all the trees I have known, within the solitude of my chamber, through the word “tree”.

Back cover

Laurence Nobécourt is not talking a lot of fine words when she tells us how writing has saved her life. This narrative is a blazing tribute to that “Way of the Word” which enables one to get closer to himself and provide his life with meaning. She is offering her initiatory memories as milestones to guide us along that scarped way: the body exuding psychic torture, the aeternal quest for the reason why one needs to go through the grief of the origins, the hurtful years of methodically getting lost in addiction, melancholy’s magnetism, but also her intensive readings, those tokens of horizons being laid opened, and last but not least a fundamental night in the company of a hallucinogenic mushroom, and within that night the revelation of the pure loving essence of the reality of our world she keeps tracking through her writing endeavours… Throughout an intimate exploration whose hazards Laurence Nobécourt depicts, including the bruised dreams, the illusions and the dazzles, a soul stages itself in the simplest apparel, cheatless, for ever guided by an upright, as free as fervent, and most of all, communicative faith.