Other People's Blogs

When I visit other people's blogs on my daily stroll through the blogosphere I am blown away—by people's art, by their lives, by who they know themselves to be and their unflinching honesty in setting that down.

Sometimes I am healed by their words, as I was this week by Maggie May's at Flux Capacitor, who wrote about the turbulence she was experiencing in her inner life, crying out for relief, and I read her words with awe and rising love at how authentically herself she managed to be, how brave, how vulnerable, how true. I lingered there, feeling a little selfish, too, because while I ached for Maggie and tried to beam her love and peace, I also rejoiced, because here, here, was my own inner world, so wildly, painstakingly described, and it was a relief, such a relief to know that others ride the same roller coaster I do, not that I wanted Maggie May to feel any pain, no, but she still healed me a little, just by writing her truth, and allowing me to say I see you, I know what you feel and it sucks, but it passes, and life for all its thousand sorrows is also replete with a thousand joys.

And then there is The Dishwasher's Tears. What darkness and art and light I found there in his often disturbing, often glorious meditation on creativity and human contradiction and abiding love. I venture gingerly into those waters, fascinated, afraid, compelled. He is a true artist. He is the kind of artist I fantasized about being when I was much, much younger, before I understood that to pursue art in that way would consume me in its fire, I wasn't built for it, I didn't have the skin. Not back then, anyway. Maybe tomorrow. But the Dishwasher, he dances in the fire and emerges, burned but somehow redeemed.

"How We Burn"
By the Tearful Dishwasher

And deb over at Talk at the Table, a wise mother soul, a poet with a tough-tender heart, watching over her five children, intimately and from afar, knowing the sinew of who they are, how they have grown, the push and the pull, the love, the love. I imagine her bathed in their light, aching sometimes at the things she understands, but pressing on, full of forgiveness and grace, fed by an expansive faith that encircles rather than excludes. I feel her goodness when I read there. Always, I come away grateful.

I had no idea when I first began writing here, that the people I would meet here, so many of you, would become friends of my mind, that I would feel such love for you, that you would find your way into my prayers, that you would know my secret heart.