The New Radicals

I’m as empty as the cornhusks that float into our yard in the fall months.

My words are being saved up right now, saved for the paid work that requires me to float lightly over my keyboard, engaging a sense of humor that is, for the most part, dormant at the moment.

I’ve entered the phase of pregnancy where I am going inside myself; preparing for the mental and physical work, for the work of the heart, that will be required of me in just a few more days.

I’m nesting – the nursery is furnished and the onsies and blankets are washed in Dreft. The diapers and wipes are waiting patiently in my new caddy, waiting to swaddle and clean a small bum.

My baby is forcing me to slow down. I am listening.

So I can’t express what I’d like to here, so I am sending you to visit Don Mills Diva, who so eloquently expresses what I feverently believe about the possibilities of blogging in this post about her new job.

For years I wrote in private as I do here. I kept a diary and I played with language and emotion and storytelling – and no one ever saw the blood, sweat and tears that made up the words on those pages. Blue ink, black ink, loopy cursive penmanship inside cloth-bound books that still sit in my basement.

Yes, I wrote for emotional release.

More so, I was writing for an imaginary audience, one denied me by a series of powerful and smug editors who gleefully decided what was good work and what was trash.

I often wound up in the trash.

No longer. I have found a space. I have turned on the volume. No longer silent, my voice echoes through the blogosphere. You seek me out or you don’t. But what matters is that I am heard.

By someone. By anyone.

We are the new radicals.

There has been so much talk in the ’sphere about commercializing your blog, writing for profit and for traffic and how to arrange your template just so, as to not alienate the casual surfer who might stumble upon you.

Tactics and marketing and profiteering.

I understand the urge. I do, really.

But oh! Friends. Please take a minute to recall my friend Charlie Brown’s sad Christmas tree. Quiet, small and in need of tending.

Just a modicum of love and affection turned that sad tree into a glorious symbol of love.

Uncluttered sidebars and pretty headers are all well and good. But what brings me to my knees are your voices, raised together in a beautiful, if cacophonous, symphony of ideas and beauty.

Keep writing. Write! That is why they come.

To listen.

I hear you. Do you hear me?