2/23/22: The Blessed Last Resort #poetry
Writing is what you do when every other field of endeavor is at a standstill. All avenues closed, yet animated with a necessity to share what you think and feel and see, you sit at the keyboard.
Anyone with an awareness of their own unique perspective (everyone has one, few know that they do) experiences something akin to loneliness. What is rejected at best, and risks dangerous, even murderous, antagonism at worst, in all other pursuits, becomes high self-fulfillment in the writer’s solitude.
The writer speaks to others at their moment of highest receptivity. There is no busyness or competition or distraction when a reader opens to writing. The reader engages on a most intimate level, listening to their own response as they hear the writer’s voice.
Writing and reading are the means to the deepest conversation. The two parties examine their respective pasts, their presents and contemplate the future. On completion they rest in a silent void, and are reminded of eternity.
Writing is a safe haven where a person can be natural. The safety is a prerequisite of peace. Even the most tempestuous words rest on a sea of serenity.
Writers are explorers, considering the mystery of humanity. In the standstill world all is defined and foolishly settled. The one who wonders is seen as lost and weak. But we have only scratched the surface of realizing who we are.
Wonder, not only the breathless kind, but even more importantly, the rankling kind … that persistent , sometimes dull, sometimes acute feeling … we are more, we are more, we are more …
Just as we have only scratched the surface of understanding the workings of the brain, and the universe … and we never will completely understand, we have barely touched the potentials of the human spirit.
All of our history, cultural and otherwise, is one step forward and two steps back, but the arc of the moral universe points up, as Dr. King said, and so does the arc of our existential capacity.
Writing is a relay race. You keep the pace established and if you are really good you may add a length or two.
Of course you don’t fit in the world where clocks and static things matter.
That mundane concrete world is a better place because of writers .
Contrary to popular opinion, writers are men and women of action. All events in the three dimensional world are framed by the theater of the mind. Jefferson the writer with his Declaration had more impact on the world than Jefferson the President and slaveholder.
Writing is where we have the opportunity to be the best of us.
All writing researches what is unknown to the writer, and reader, and imagines the possibilities of the new discovery.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
The Rick Blog 