Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Bloggin' Blues

I am not checking again. I am not logging in, not calling up this blog, not looking to see if anyone has stopped by.

Okay. I am. But not for another three hours.

Theoretically, I could be talking to thousands of people. In reality, I might just as well discuss my thoughts with the water in my toilet bowl or my plants. Is this important?

A writer likes to communicate. In order to communicate, ideally, there should be a communicator and a communicatee. (I know that's not a word. Please God, don't let the only comment for weeks be a correction of my vocabulary.)

On the other hand (and there's always another hand if you're me), a *Buddhist warrior training slogan floats to mind: "Don't expect applause." That drifts along in my grey matter and bumps into a vaguely remembered Maslow Inventory test result...something about having a high level of self-actualization. Which means being who you want to be without undue fuss over living up to the expectations of society. More or less.

You might also expect that a serious schizophrenic would score high in that too, but nonetheless, these thoughts cheer me. I ask myself why I'm writing this blog - and I answer myself (because the water in the toilet bowl and my plants are notoriously uncommunicative), because I can't not write. (Please God, don't let the only comment be a correction of a double negative.)

Because I can't not write. Because I love to write. Because the small, everyday stuff seems miraculous to me. Because I want to wave to the world, send them a raspberry, blow them a kiss, raise my middle finger and wave it around. I want to congratulate all of us, including myself, for being here. Just for being here, which is an act of supreme bravery.

Flush.

(*see: The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron, Shambhala Boston & London 2001.)