On Blogging-- Blog On!

Before I began to write this guest column, I thought I'd better look at a few others to make sure I wasn't saying the same things. Then I realized that I'd just be comparing mine to theirs, and I stopped reading. Comparisons are dangerous to the inner spirit. I trust that my impression and experience of blogging will be different from other people's, and also have some similarities. That's just the way we are.

Blogging, to me, is a spiritual exercise, both in the writing and in the reading. Maybe not always, but when it's at its best, it is an authentic medium for people to reveal the deepest thoughts and yearnings of their souls. When I write my blog thoughtfully, I give voice to who I am and what has influenced me. I become a little more than I was before I wrote about it. It is a medium of actualization.

Sometimes I use my writing time to discover things about myself and my world that I didn't consciously know. You've all done that. You've typed out something and found yourself saying, "Where did that come from?" You credit your muse. I credit my unconscious, and even the collective unconscious. Maybe that's the same thing? Whatever it is, it is the source of creativity, and creativity is definitely spiritual.

I read once that an important value in having a spouse is that they are witnesses to our lives, as our parents were to our childhood. They can chronicle what happened to us, and how we reacted. They know us.

Even those of us who are fortunate to have loving spouses may feel that they do not always know our innermost being. They maybe aren't even particularly interested in the wanderings of our minds when they aren't directly interacting with us or profiting from what we've been doing. E.g., Bill is happy that I made bean soup yesterday, but he has no attachment to how enchanted I am with the look of a handful of dried black beans in their shiny, ebony perfection and their little white eyes. They look like smooth river rocks, and if I were building a sand castle, I'd want black beans to make the path up to the moat.

Now that's a silly example maybe, but it's what I meant. Our imaginations go off in interesting ways, unknown to others who don't read what we write. There's a depth in all of us that doesn't surface in our ordinary conversations about our activities of daily living. Who else, except the person with a very attentive listener, has the opportunity to reflect on her day, with its puzzles and its delights, besides a blogger? Who else takes the time to focus the lens of his mind both inward and outward? Poets, philosophers, those who meditate-sure, there are people who do take those daily journeys. But how many of them share what they find like bloggers do?

Reading the blogs of others is like seeing the world through many more sets of eyes, feeling the pulse of people throughout the world as they view their own unique circumstances that are out of our sight. By reading, we have a little better sense of what it's like to be the mother of a soldier, a greeter at Wal-mart, a woman who was raped as a girl, a daughter with the care of her parents on her shoulders. We find we have things in common with people who are gay, or who live in Africa, or who struggle with addictions. Blogging opens up the world of others to us, and it opens our own world to us as well.

Here's a quote from Thomas Merton that brings all this into my frame of reference: "His one Image is in us all, and we discover Him by discovering the likeness of His image in one another."