WRITING FOR AIR

It’s easy to be that smug, clever, verbally glib toast of the cocktail party, to drink just the right number of gin fizzes to find just the right combination of words to turn just about anything into a joke.

Not so easy to find something sacred in your life, something you respect for the simple reason that it deserves it. And to know it deserves it for the even more simple reason that it has earned it.

People read those sacred words of yours even when you wish there were more of them, or they wish there were fewer of your words, and those readers, which is what we call people when we forget why we started writing in the first place, talk to other people, who have hearts full of searing desire, who share, persuade, love, hate, kill, hug, nurture, and sleep around because of your words, or mine, or those of their parents, who might not have loved them as much as we do.

If in that tiny office of yours that always feels too hot or cold you write This word, That word – Verb my Noun! your words move me to hate, love, laugh, think, desire, and crave, and so I share how you’ve made me feel, and in sharing shape the world atom by atom, and we both know how pesky those little atoms can be.

Your writing is sacred because people are, and our earth is, and the things we love and hate and care about are.

Participate in the sacred because we need your sacred words, flawed as they are, like you, you beautiful, immoral, uplifting, passionate, desperate, decrepit animal.

Participate in the sacred because we need your words to remind us to save,
to love
to nurture,
to judge and excoriate,
to forgive and apologize,
to dream,
to ground.
And to remind me to scream
Stop!