prelude

There is something fundamentally uncomfortable to me about this sort of writing. I've avoided it for years. Avoided it because I'm tired, because the internet feels like an increasingly complicated place to communicate in any meaningful way, because I have a platform of a different sort where I have an ongoing conversation with people I know, work with, and am tasked with caring for. When those things fade, though, I find myself with a mistrust of the kind of certainty that feels implied in Published Writing. Even if that writing is only published by me.

Certainty seems to run around hand in hand with hubris, a confidence out of proportion with what a human conceivably can know. It seems like a place where we go to hide from the mess and chaos of reality. Something we do when our fundamental vulnerability to the world and each other is beyond our ability or willingness to bear. Maybe this isn't about writing so much as how our (kyriarchal, dominance obsessed, white supremacist, classist, etc.) society uses writing. Maybe that's not worth pulling apart, certainly I'm not going to try right now. Perhaps, though, I don't have to use writing that way. I've seen it done.

Most of what I'm trying to say is that I haven't written in a long time, and it is a different form than I've gotten used to (I don't generally write more than notes for my sermons/platforms in my work life). I want to make it clear that this is an experiment. That whatever I say here should, I hope – I aim – be more a question than a declarative, and when it's declarative knows itself to be only what I can see from my vantage point as one human person. A human person who thinks and feels and tries a lot, who has many fine qualities and relevant experiences, but is always only just one of many billions now living, who have ever and will ever live.

I'll try to explore all of this and more as we go. Perhaps we'll get somewhere.

Soon.