No Pictures!!!

A common device among we bloggers is called "Wordless Wednesday" (bloggers are big on alliteration), on which a blogger will post pictures in lieu of any words. Being a rebel (it's true, if you didn't know that) I am going to go against the grain and inaugurate the ocassional "Primarily-Text Wednesday".

There are many bloggers who really inspire me with their "flow", or facility in the verbal direction. My wife is definitely one of them when she helms the blog, and there are some others who I really enjoy reading. But I feel like my own abilities are more in the area of posting pictures, or sharing other people's work. I wish that I were a little more more adept with the writing, and I found a couple of things recently that moved me to think about this.

These two pieces are from a man named Henri Nouwen who was a Catholic priest. He was widely published, and thoughtfully examined his own devotion to writing. Although he died in 1996 before the whole blogging thing, his words seem pretty appropriate to why a lot of people might do this (thanks to Brighthaven Times):

"Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write. Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be “redeemed” by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too."



I like this a lot, and I really feel like posting the pictures, etc. can do the same thing as well. But writing does really make you think about your experiences in a deeper way. I like this one too:


"We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them."


While I don't think that we're doing more things now just because they can be blogged, I do think that part of the enjoyment of some of our experiences now is sharing them with people through this medium. Hopefully this includes sharing it all one day with the kids, if the whole system doesn't crash and lose it all! Anyone know anything about saving all of this stuff?


Anyway, as a finale for Primarily-Text Wednesday, here's a poem that I saw on the great site 3 Quarks Daily:




The Meadow


Marianne Larsen


this evening the meadow seems the essential thing
and because of it
what we talk about this evening
includes stalks and streams and frogs
and insects and eggs and blackbirds
and lack of worries about work and contracts
rent contracts and other contracts
this evening
not far from us the children are walking
hand in hand with their grown-ups
it is a meadow
true, there’s a city on top of it



Pictures next time!