Back in Middle Georgia College, we had a professor who started every class in American Government with these words: "The question before the house is...." He pronounced "house" hoose.
The repetition of that phrase every day for an entire quarter branded it in our brains. I think of it often as I begin to write, especially as I write about something as personal as my own spiritual journey--which I'm going to wrap up in this post. The question before the house is, frankly: "Who, besides me, cares?"
I've read several writers who say that they write for one person, sometimes two. For themselves and one close friend or for one imagined stranger. Joan Didion said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
I write to find out what I'm thinking: Putting words on a page or a screen, I'm often surprised by what I say. If I started out knowing what I was going to say, I wouldn't have had to write it to get there.
As for "who cares?" I care--about what it my truth enough to write it, and I care about the truths of other writers, in my groups and writers who have been like lighthouses for me through the years. When a writer reads aloud what she's excavated from her own soul and memory, I often respond with goosebumps, a visceral response to "what is true" for her being also true for me--or close.
I started this blog as a travelogue as I drove, solo, to the west coast. And yet, here I am, still writing. Writing is my spiritual journey.
John Keats wrote, "All writing is a form of prayer." Writing connects me to you--those of you who are reading this blog--and it connects me to whatever is bigger, even when it's the larger territory of my own mind.
Each time I read a good memoir or novel or poem, I'm blown away--as we used to say in the sixties.
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