Recently, I received
a note from a special friend. She wrote to acknowledge a kindness, and then told
me that by following my example of daily “journaling” she has been “sustained
in many ways.”
“Making you an
important role model for me,” she wrote in closing.
I had a moment of
clarity with my journal the other day. Largely because of the sense of my life
as a thinker and a writer.
What I’ve learned
in thirty-five years of journal writing, some bits leading to essays and blog
posts and short stories and plays and novels and memoir junks and prose-poems,
is, ahem, humility.
I write, choose
words in an honest attempt to connect within a world that I’m knowingly a
minuscule part; hold fast to what I know, have learned, expect nothing.
You are born
alone, and you die alone.
We have love, lost
love, love reborn. Family, bloodlines are only the most consistently reliable source of love.
Why, when the well
is dry or poisoned or worse, we, as people, suffer.
What is the cost
of a broken heart? Neglect that leads to disease and injury, costly care, early death.
Pursue happiness,
and never stop. Only through love. There is nothing else.
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