Bare Your Soul & Bring Your Words: The Art of Writing Bravely

By Rachel Kang

God's Brave Women - Rachel's Story

Next to the potted plants—the lavender and the rosemary and the succulent—sits the coir-stitched welcome mat to our front door, which reads…

Bare Your Soles.

Bare your soles, it says. As in, take off your shoes and retire from travel. As in, stay a while to rest and unravel that actual soul of yours. Smooth out that wrinkle on your forehead, calm the beating of your heart to stillness, to presence.

The mat at my front door is like a welcome sign that beckons bystanders to walk and enter through, all barefoot and barely breathing, all desperate for a couch to catch their tired bodies.

Irrevocably, the same is true of a blank page—it is an invitation that bids,

Come. Bare your soul.

In her poem, Emily Dickinson makes mention of such bareness and boldness. “Tell the truth,” she writes. Emit your experience, share your sincerity, tell your truth. And, though, the rest of the poem’s line—but tell it slant—calls for the kind of truth-telling that is round about and circumventive, so as to “dazzle” what is harsh, what is hard, and what is heavy, I propose we tell the truth without manipulating our words to be safe, or acceptable, or sound, or nice.