The Calling It’s terrifying– the page beckons like the white light they say ushers in death, as all the things that once shaped your life are pulled away. The guides are gone; teachers with their suggestions of stories, perhaps a mystery about a cat; professors with limitless prompts, soft ethnic music for a writing exercise; not even the bones of a sonnet to cling to, or the stepping stones of end rhyme. This is the first time you realized the true solitude of your calling, pen poised above the page you pause like a runner standing before an endless stretch of road to be filled with the beat of shoes on pavement. This is what we all fear– a void. Nightly a page gleams from the surface of your desk, never patient and only briefly satisfied. It calls to you like a quest, a journey you cannot predict and may not survive. Yet when the page is filled and filled well it’s as if you fell over the lip of the world, were buoyed up, and sailed on alive.