Consider this
You know what I like about writing? No, not text messaging, instant messaging or chat room exchanges. I’m talking about writing — where people sit down at a computer, word processor, typewriter or just with a piece of paper and pencil in hand and write. To someone else or, and this has special appeal to me, just to themselves.
What I like about writing is that it is contemplative.
This combination website-weblog has been up and running for less than three weeks, and so far, there hasn’t been a lot of interchange between readers and writers. But we’ve already either attracted or enlisted six writers. And only one of them — well, maybe two — write professionally.
That’s a pretty good record, considering the proliferation of weblogs these days. And the reason is that, despite society’s ever-increasing interconnectedness through radio, television, telephones, cell phones, computer chat rooms and instant text messagers, we humans are basically a contemplative bunch.
We need contemplation. We need quietness. We need connectedness with ourselves. We need to sort out our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our observations and put them into written words.
That’s what the best writing is, even when it is intended for other people to read.
Our latest contributor is Barbara Phelps-McMichael, who plans in July to connect with a lot of people she hasn’t seen for a long time — her eighth-grade classmates at their 50th-year reunion. She communicates with them — and with us — in our latest nonfiction offering, “A Trip in Time.”
We’ve also had contributions from Virginia Sunderman in the poetry section and Blaise Schweitzer in the nonfiction section. In the blogroll, John H. Williams shares his thoughts about religion and life in the weblog Trite but True, Michael Moore — not the filmmaker but the Arizona philosopher-curmudgeon — offers essays and letters in Vox Clamantis, and an anonymous waiter tells you what he really thinks about his customers, his employers and his life in Waiter Rant.
Even though they need only their own, they could all use your contemplation.
– Sid Leavitt
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