Being

I got the most wondrous message from a long ways away recently. "Thank you," it said. I was pleased to get it, but really was baffled because I really had no idea at all what I'd done that was deserving of thanks.

I wrote back to my correspondent and said exactly that... "I don't know what it is that I have done," and they responded: "You were just being you."

Well, I've thought about that little exchange, and it seems to me that there is really an interesting "secret" in there somewhere. I know that I am often bemused by how many people read and respond to what I write here, because to me most of it seems pretty pedestrian and not at all profound or interesting or informative in any sense. Still, on a pretty regular basis, I will get some kind of comment or email that tells me that someone is touched in a way that I never expected by what I wrote about something I experienced or thought about...by me just being me. Wow!

Just last week, I was chatting with someone I haven't talked with in awhile, someone who walked the early part of this path with me. She and I have diverged a good bit in our experiences in recent years and haven't had a lot of contact. She brought up the subject of this blog, and so I talked a bit about how I experience the writing here; what it takes for me mentally to write without an overpowering awareness of all the eyes that read. Because, the audience does participate in the way blogs come to sound I think. Some blogs are very audience driven and come to be very much performance venues. You can hear the awareness of the onlookers in the way the writer writes. I don't have a knack for that kind of writing. If I get too caught up in watching my stats; too aware of all of you reading here, I lose my ability to say anything at all -- it simply makes me so self-conscious that I can't think of what it is that I was thinking in the first place. Nor am I particularly good at fiction. I haven't the ability to make other voices up in my head... they all end up sounding like me trying to sound like someone else -- just doing really bad accents! No; I'm a reporter of my own news, and a naturalist exploring my own internal landscape. My best writing comes when I simply sit down inside my own head and look around and listen quietly and record what I find there. If I pay too much attention to the noises from "outside" my own universe, then I become distracted and unable to focus enough to make any sense of it all. Maybe it is that I am too much of an ADHD "child" to capture the essence unless I put all my energy into that laser-like internal focus.

Whatever, I was touched by the gift of knowing that there are people who appreciate the plain stuff of what comes out here. I cannot figure out how to value it for anyone but my own self. I am coming to a real awareness that the "prescription" that this place was in the beginning has proved exactly right -- that He was right in demanding it. The words that have poured out here have healed and saved me; pointed the way when I could not see the path; linked me to my community when I felt entirely alone; taught me to wait when I only wanted to run; let me laugh and sing when the joy was on me; let me rage when I needed to do that; and given me a sense of myself, finally, that feels sure and calm and steady and peaceful... All because there were words and those who were willing to read and sift and respond to them.

I am grateful, and enormously humbled.

swan