Writing here and allowing others to know my deepest thoughts, both the admirable and venerable and the dark and painful, has been an interesting experience.  Of all those whose feedback I receive it is often those who perceive they know me best who are seem surprised most.  

What is found on this blog is a sort of self-therapy, where I open myself to write unfiltered for my own eyes to see more clearly the musing that swims within.  Casting them into the world forces me even further to face them.  No running away when anyone can read them!  There are dear friends who make comments like “let her go”, “you’re pretend happy”, “stop thinking like that”, “you imagine things that can never be”, “you’re wallowing in your pain” or simply “that’s a fairy tale”.  I reflect back two thoughts:  “How effective is it to tell someone in pain to stop hurting” and “If I am happy in my delusion, what is the harm of it”. 

How richly I am blessed to have friends who care about me so much they wish to ‘set me straight’.  I know they have only the very best intention in mind.  My gratitude is deep and wide for those who love me and wish my life to be better.  I am richly blessed. 

My finding is when I release my thoughts to the world in an uninhibited and often down-right raw manner that gesture alone is healing for me.  By sharing my undisclosed and concealed secrets, positive and negative, I become mentally quieter and more content. 

A yearning of mine may appear to some to be pure fantasy or wishing for the impossibly perfect. Usually I know when I am expressing one of those dreams one wishes for knowing it is somewhere between highly unlikely and completely impracticable.  Thinking in such a manner has brought the hidden child within me back to life with sparkling hope.  Just as a five-year-old wishes for innocent whimsy, the dream alone is the answer to its wish. 

A pining for a long-lost love or rehash of old childhood pain is only a further release for me of tension and discomfort that remains.  With each little spew and hiss of words, the pressure of the slowly diminishing hurt is relieved a bit more:  a healthy practice.     

How often I have failed to understand the emotion behind the content of an email as I paint the words on the screen with the emotional color I add.  I am coming to realize that each person who reads what I write here filters my words differently.  The meaning received by each reader is different from the next and frequently askew by a little or a lot of what I was thinking and feeling when the words first appeared on my screen.  That’s OK! 

What pleases me most is I am striking chords within others.  As a friend accurately pointed out, people usually respond strongest toward what we read or hear when the content is already alive within the reader.  To share about pain can awaken someone else to release a bit of a hurt.  To share about joy can renew another’s delight. To share about anguish can rouse and help diminish a reader’s agony.  To share about gladness can rekindle bliss…. And so on.    

From an article titled “Word Play: The Power of the Written Word in Ancient Israel” by Joey Corbett comes:  To the modern world, the written word is often taken for granted. We are so removed from the origins of writing that when we write something, whether on a piece of paper, on a sign or on the internet, we don’t even think about the physical act of creating words. For us, writing is simply a means to an end, an almost primordial and instinctive technology that we use to communicate with each other. 

… when alphabetic writing had just begun to spread across the masses of the ancient Near East, written words were far more than idle marks meant simply to be read. Words were repositories of power, physical vessels that gave material reality to one’s innermost thoughts and even the soul itself. 

The magical properties of writing meant that written words, once they came into being, were active and sometimes even unstable forces that could be manipulated, both for good and for ill. 

As an avid reader since early childhood, I am grateful to see the return of the power of the written word.  For soon to be a hundred years the spoken word has grown in strength through radio, telephone and television.  With the internet  written word that has become powerful again.  Whether expressing deep emotions that touch others or writing of injustice that overturns governments, we live again in a time of power for the written word.  I am very grateful for this turn of events and hope my small contributions serve in some small way to better life for a few in this modern world.   

Words must surely be counted
among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Leo Rosten