some good talk.

What do you want to talk about tonight? There are days I get hungry for good talk. I don't want to talk about my day, what I ate, what I did, where I went. I don't want to talk about the weather and public transportation and paying rent and making money and I don't want to ask or answer the question, How are you?

You know what I mean when I say good talk. The stuff that makes up living: belief, love, hope, suffering, compassion, service, purpose, death, loss, religion, government, good, evil, and on it goes.

I would be in a happy world if I could ask every stranger I met if they believed in a god and why or why not. I suppose survival dictates that we can't bare our souls to everyone we meet, and I'm certainly not the soul-baring type. But I would like to know people.

Back in October, I joined Twitter because, for years, I've been following the journal Creative Nonfiction. They have a running contest for tweets - Tiny Truths, as they're called. I would get the newsletters and see the winning tweets and think, Man, how cool. I wish that was me.

So I joined and I've been tweeting every so often and a lot of my tweets have been picked as winners in this contest. But the big prize is that a few are selected for each quarterly journal. And it is May and Creative Nonfiction: Issue #44 is out in the world now, and one of my tweets is in it.

always fears, you know.

Yesterday, in my empty kitchen, staring at I-don't-remember-what on my computer, I felt it with a rush: something I need to write about. I postponed for a few moments, made an omelette, dusted my bedroom, cleaned the toilet. And it was lost. Even now, more than twenty-four hours later, I can't remember what I was so longing to write about. There was a time I would have mourned such a loss, but not so much these days. I lost hold of an idea, but the brain that thought it up is still in my head. That idea or something like it or something better will come along again. It's much like Annie Dillard says, we shouldn't be afraid to use up good ideas as they come. We don't need to save them up, because more will come.

Stories build empathy and empathy build connection. Do you realize this? Do you know the power of a story? It isn't a luxury.

I have been thinking about stories quite a bit lately, thinking about the ways they weave all through our lives. Not just in a book or on a stage or flashing through a TV screen. But we live our lives as stories, we organize our thoughts and feelings as such, and our very way of thinking is driven by it. Why? I am ticking off books-to-read on the subject, and so longer grows my books-to-read list, as it has been doing since forever.

I am a writer tonight. A few good things have come along to remind me. Good words.

I feel sad sometimes that writing is less the form of common communication that it used to be. It's a sort of default for me, and often so much easier than talking straight from my mouth. I have been known to hang up a phone without saying anything I meant to, followed by an email or letter that says all the rest.

expect.

I have come to believe in knowing what you love. What I mean is that each of us knows, deep down, the things that bring us happiness. These are things we read or eat or talk about or do. And we know them.

We are here and alive now, are we not?

I have just finished reading An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler and it is one of the most beautiful books I've read in awhile. It's the kind of beautiful that makes your heart feel a little swollen, a little fuller. The kind that makes you think I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive. It is full of the simplest pleasures and the reality we find deep inside our survival, in the food we grow, prepare, and put inside our bodies. But the pleasure runs beyond survival, and so it is precious.

You know the things that make you happy, I think. You know the things that you love. You know the moments when you're alive. It has taken me some poverty and heartbreak and hard work to realize that I know these things too. This might be very silly advice for me to give, but there it is: take, live, do these things now. Do them now. Find the things, especially the small and simple things, and fill your life up with them.

I'm reading The Gift right now, by Lewis Hyde, and he has a thoughtful section devoted to gift economies and the ways that scarcity and market systems breed constant, ever-growing discontent. There's an old tradition of deep satisfaction and happiness to be found among people who live with very little and who have a generous spirit.

My point is only that life has a way of getting very full of things that don't mean much. Some of it is necessary. Jobs to pay the rent and obligations to be met. But it's worthwhile to combat some of the empty things with the things that make you happy.

It's worth remembering.

It's also worth remembering that you will only be capable of what you expect of yourself, so expect a great deal. I am saying this to myself quite a bit lately. I expect something big will come of it.

quite right.

I know, it's been awhile. Actually, it's been awhile for awhile. I would like to apologize, but I would also like to say that it's been necessary, or at least I think so. Things here were feeling stale to me. I've grown tired of saying the same thing same thing same thing. It's started feeling a bit whiny, at least in my own ears.

So for these two weeks, I have been running my brain over and over the whole lot and searching for something - a new direction, a new sense of purpose, a new "why" as in why I am writing here and why you might be reading here. No matter the gaps and the absences, I came here as a way to hold myself accountable. And for the most part, it has worked. It would be quite a shame to give up now. I believe, somewhere in me, that I have reached the giving-up-moment, that is the moment when everyone wants to quit. And I believe that the difference between success and failure is getting through this moment and to the other side.

I still don't know quite where to take things, but can I ask you to stick it out?

I have been writing this post for days because I don't know what to say. I don't think anything has resolved itself in my head. I think I might be a fool sometimes for hoping to resolve my thoughts and my purpose and myself. In fact, that might be the thing that paralyzes me most.

Have you ever had a big, stretching, yawning weekend with nothing to do but make a pot of soup and write and somehow all you did was make the pot of soup and didn't write, not one single word? I have. But enough of that.