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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
18-Jul-2001-19:35:20 |
| Subject: |
Goin' Interactive |
This morning at my favorite coffee joint I had one of those great cafe conversations. You know the ones, where several seemingly unrelated trains of thought come together and start running on the same track. I thought I'd share some of it with you.
Three of us were sharing the same table, each of us writing in our own notebooks in silence, doing the Journaling thing. Then, synchronistically, we all finished at about the same time and started chatting about what we had been writing. The songwriter had been writing about one of his latest songs, wondering whether anyone would ever really 'get' it. The artist/writer had been writing about her very autobiographical book, and wondering whether her attempts to edit it were cutting some of the magic out of it. And I had been writing about the Ramalila message board, and about how much I had learned there over the years.
It turned into a cool conversation. We talked about keeping a Journal, and how important that was. And we talked about the *limits* of Journaling, in that it's primarily a braindump, with no real feedback loop. And we talked about being a creative artist, and the real challenge of that, which is to actually *reach* your audience, touch them in some way. And then we talked about conversation itself, and the magic of being able to not only take a braindump, but receive feedback on it, feedback that helps you get your...uh...shit together.
Somewhere along the line, listening to the artist/writer talk about how worried she was about over-editing her work, the songwriter came up with a great metaphor. He said something like, "Even though I haven't read it, I can feel that what you are writing is very personal to you. It deals with a painful situation you lived through and learned from. But the fact that you lived through it means that in one sense you developed *antibodies* to that particular painful situation. If I were you, I would trust your first intuition and not edit your writing too much, because you're not trying to share the pain with your readers, you're trying to share the antibodies. You learned something valuable from the experience, and if you're honest about it and don't censure yourself too much, you can pass along the antibodies to others, to help them out."
I liked this. A lot. It was completely relevant to what I had been writing in my Journal about this message board. For me it's been a remarkable thing, a kind of interactive Journal. Here, surrounded by people who are to some extent on the same wavelength as ourselves, we can not only take the occasional braindump, we can get some useful feedback from our friends on whether it's *good shit* or not. :-) Being seekers, not content with just coasting through life, we all have our periods of dis-ease. We can express that dis-ease here, just as we do in our Journals, but here we can get some feedback from others who have been there, done that with that same dis-ease and found some way to deal with it. If they have developed a cool way of looking at that particular dis-ease, they are in effect sharing the *antibody* they have developed with us, turning it into a vaccine via the magic of intent, allowing us to benefit from their experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is thanks to all who created this forum, and to those who have contributed to it. It's been a real shot in the arm. :-)
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