
Tell yourself you’re doing it for humanity. Teeming, varied,
rushing life. What binds us here in this place? What makes us pass
each other in the street and pause, looking into another’s face to notice: I see you. I understand. Something like that
happened to me. I felt like that once.
We don’t always get it right. Sometimes the right word, the right
phrase, slips through our grasp, bobbing and submerging into the green stew. We
try. We describe its slippery surface, the feel of it. We gaze into the murky
depths, looking for clues, for context.
Testimony:
evidence or proof provided by the existence
or appearance of something.
It’s important, what you do. Never lose sight of that.
That a-ha moment, empathy, recognition—these are the best parts of humanity. It’s
wonderful to be loved but oh, to be understood.
Keep at it, scribes. What you do is important. Not
everyone has the patience to stop and look, to try to articulate what it means
to be here, right now. Pen to paper, fingers on keyboard, keep gazing towards
the horizon, continue excavating memory, and feeling, and hope. Spill it out,
profess, recite. What you do is important and so necessary.
Related Posts:
The Suggestion of Color
I saw one of those quizzes on social media the other day,
where you’re led through a series of seemingly innocuous questions until
something is… Read More
Writing Affirmations
Tell yourself you’re doing it for humanity. Teeming, varied,
rushing life. What binds us here in this place? What makes us pass
each other in t… Read More
Birth of a Story
The story comes in the wee hours, the witching hours, the
stuck-between-night-and-day hours of three and five. It plays like a movie.
There sh… Read More
On Potato Eyes and Story Ideas
Do you know how to grow potatoes? Maybe you watched Matt
Damon do it in The Martian. Actually,
it’s not rocket science. A potato will start to… Read More
100,000 Views: A Retrospective
I began this blog in October of 2010, at a time when I was
beginning to envision myself as a writer. Sure, I had always written—had
finished a fe… Read More
"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka
Your piece reminds me of Buckminster Fuller, who once heard an inner voice that declared:
ReplyDeleteFrom now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
Thank you for sharing that. "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself," as if suppressing the urge to express is against life itself. Love that.
Delete