Fellow Scribblers, I want you to surrender your quill for a moment and ask yourself in all honesty, "why do I write?" Why do I drudge and toil with no period in sight for my sentence? Or better yet, "why can't I STOP?"
Humanity is such a strange species. We are knit together with more than flesh and blood. The syllables of myths, legends, prayers and hopes are rooted deep in our psyche. Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms,” and I believe her. Perhaps "In the beginning was the Word..." reveals a new facet of complexity (John 1:1).
My dearest friend in the Milky Way (or any other galaxy, for that matter) died a few years back. I was deleting junk from an old email account when I found a message from this person with a simple admonishment: "Take care and follow your dreams. They are the best part of you." But what makes the blasted dream so precious, worth wagering everything we are against the weight of "the Nothing"?*(read The Neverending Story)
To answer that I must take you to Antelope Island, a wind-swept strip of land in the middle of Utah's Great Salt Lake. As any self-respecting island has a gift shop, I visited it and purchased a book entitled, Earth Prayers from around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations Honoring the Earth edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon. On page 170 there is a description of the Heaven of Indra. It speaks of a "network" of pearls stranded together in such a way that by gazing at a single orb, one may catch the entire web of pearls in the reflection. The gems are inseparably interlaced both in reflection and in reality.
To quit writing and dreaming would be like trying to sever the pearl strands or splitting the chain of our own atoms. The interconnections are already there--we just need to keep beading them, word by word.
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