The Word

 The work of blogging is simple enough. Just sit down and write something. Reading the blogs later proves that more thought and less haste is a pretty good way to live. 

    While some blogs are specific, to find and share information about a skill, commodity or adventure, my own work is more self-serving. I've been fascinated by the ways my mind and heart connect with the world--it's an "inside-outside" story.

    Since the day I learned to write my name, I've been a writer. Words have always been powerful to me, rich with endless avenues and pathways to explore. My early exploits in poetry investigated the way words connect, like threads in a web. Later stories investigated ways words are woven into cloth, whole, rough or broad. It makes no difference to a "word wielder". 

    But behind all these less-than-meaningful explorations, there was another power, a broad and diffuse force, like the breeze that comes before a summer storm. It touches, and you sense what is to come. Writing has always had that, for me, and I'm only coming to understand now that the "force" I sense behind the words is their very Source. As it says in the Gospel, "In the beginning, was the Word..."

    I am not a professional writer. I have never earned a dime for my words. And so I am a less-disciplined writer. I slop things down in untidy journals of every shape and size. I type endlessly at all hours of the day and night. I dream up new stories (and fuss over old ones), relegating them to drawers, files, boxes, bins and satchels until the mountain elves come and carry them off. Emily Dickenson wrote about how she "hit a world at every drop." I line up worlds and drive straight into them. Someday I'll probably go so far as turning off spell-checker. Why should words be perfect? Life is full of dents, scratches and rough-ends...

    But like a Forty-Niner chipping through granite to follow a vein of gold, I keep at it whenever I have time, looking for one or two perfect words, unhewn gems of absolute quality. "God said 'Let there be light!' And in that single, primordial act, all time and all of history began." (Catechism of the Catholic Church)

    There's power in words.