Passions Part I

My passion?

As Mary guessed, I have a few. And one of them, I don’t think you who have followed me on my blogging journey have too hard a time guessing at. This is it. You’re looking at it.

In my own words:

"But I look at it this way. I love music...have always loved music. I sing all the time. I even played the guitar in my younger days, sang in the church choir for awhile. But I was not given the talent, the zeal, the passion for music that a true musician must possess. I will sing, and I will play guitar, if I darn well want to. It makes me happy. But it doesn’t make me a musician.

"Writing, however, is something that bubbles up from a well in the depths of my soul. Something I have to do, as much as eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. It’s part of who I am, and who I will always be. There have been times in my life when I didn’t write; crazy, busy times when I did not use my God-given talent for anything more than love letters and birthday cards. In retrospect, those turned out to be the times when I was simply playing at being someone, something, that I am not. I may have even thought I was happy, that I had ‘made it.’ But I was not being true to myself. I ignored my talent because it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t always fun. And it didn't put food on the table. Truthfully, if I was still working full-time, I probably would not yet have ‘rediscovered’ myself…"

"And then there are the rest of us. The ones who are neither wholly satisfied with this place of literary masturbation, nor even remotely capable of walking away from it. In the midst of dealing with life issues, we don’t quit writing. Our prose might gain a new dimension from our trials. It might reveal a glimpse of a heart in mourning, or become strident as we rail against challenges to our souls. Or we may murmur peace and understanding as we gain some insight on our journey. But always, the words come. We could no more stop writing than we could stop breathing. The concept of being too busy to write is beyond our ken. Writing is what we DO. Have always done."

"I don’t know why anyone would be upset not to be a writer. Like any other talent, it is often more of a burden than a joy. At best, it’s a roller-coaster existence. You create something satisfying, and you soar to the rooftops. You go through a dry spell, and you fall through a crack in the floor. What is it about right-brained talents that we who possess them always feel we are on the brink of losing them? Why this ever-present fear that the font of words, or notes, or colors, is not bottomless?"

For good or ill, better or worse, writing is my passion.

For a couple hours this evening, I dove back into my archives. Perused some of the old entries.. The ones I wrote when I had the time...to write things that made sense, that used all my god-given tools to communicate the thing that was inside me that needed to get out. And, by damn…one or two of those essays were decent. Really good. Damn, I thought. I can write.

But…make a living at it? Tweak it and pound it and pasteurize it to fit someone else’s idea of what is acceptable, or what would sell; what is worthy or beautiful?

Not a chance.

This…this blog. This is as close as I could possibly come.