ABOUT THIS BLOG

Lightning Medicine Woman

This Blog is an experiment in going public with my journal.  Writing has always stimulated my intuition and caused sparks of illumination to crackle in my head.  If perhaps someone else can also see these flashes of light in an otherwise dull landscape it will please me very much. Primarily I write for myself because writing down visions and ideas is like throwing out flies in a trout stream, I almost always catch something.

A long time ago I couldn't write about anything that was important to me.  I even failed classes in school because I refused to write what I thought or felt.  It felt like being naked in public and the public was not very tolerant. It's a good thing that I eventually got over this block because my memory isn't good enough to hold all those thoughts anymore.  The way I overcame this handicap was that  a friend who was very important to me moved out of state. This was long before cell phones when long distance calls could rack up a big debt.  I was stuck with a dilemma.

At this point I will make the observation that dilemmas are the greatest creative environment that exists. People actually set up dilemmas in order to solve them.  I know that usually we think that dilemmas drive creativity but I've come to believe that it is the other way around.  I don't remember which wise man it was, I think he was one of the Sufi Mullahs who said, "the devil is God's most humble servant". I've come to truly appreciate that seemingly heretical statement. Without problems to solve life becomes static, i.e., lifeless.  Paradox is another wedge between realities. Paradoxes are the gateway between what we believe and what lies between the projector and the little screen that receives this movie we call reality.

I was very lonely when my best friend moved.  But it was even worse than lonely.  It was as if I had fallen off a space ship and was drifting into endless, soundless darkness.  I realized that I would have to communicate by mail. This was a huge decision and caused sweat on my brow and a lump in my stomach. Then that little Zen master that sits on my left shoulder told me that the answer to the dilemma might be found in writing about the dilemma itself.  And so I did. I began writing about my fear of writing, about my feeling of lostness and about each bump that I came to on this new road.  That unblocked the writing block. Of course here and there I run out of ideas, but that is temporary and merely means I'm not paying attention.

At some time I may change this blog and add more art, photos, paradoxes and films, but for now I'm just leaving the writing gate open until I run out of things to write about.