Why I Write

I really enjoy the process of writing. I suppose it is a pleasure akin to solving a puzzle. I have thoughts and experiences and I want to curate them and arrange them in a way that fits into the grand puzzle that is the mystery of living a meaningful life. So one might say I have a philosophical bent, if we see philosophy as an effort to standardize or explain the basic human sensation of “meaningfulness.”

So I experience meaning as a feeling, and I crave it, I seek it. But for me it’s not so much akin to awe or thrill as it is to uncovering linkages to other meaningful episodes, finding connections, both in my own experiences and in those of other pilgrims of meaning. That’s the puzzle part, when two nodes of meaning suddenly align, like the outlines of a puzzle piece suddenly fitting into place. Indeed, I uncover a great deal of meaning for myself in this process of writing.

There is also the puzzle of words, in finding just the right phrase or adjective to express my thought. It’s frustrating and I get bogged down in refining and reworking, I often lose sight of my objective as I obsessively hone the articulation, like grinding away at a knife blade, sharpening it until there is no metal left to sharpen. But sometimes it comes out just right, and again, there’s that little snap of the puzzle piece, words falling into place. I’m really saying what I mean.

Why You Read

I have lived an interesting life, mostly navigating along narrow roads and tangled paths in life, not cruising down the interstate of conventional American culture. I like to write about my “Caveman Phase” when I lived in remote New Mexican wilderness, or my adventures as a naive (meaning completely unqualified) family farmer trying to help my mother run her (our family’s) organic produce and flower farm. I think you might find those stories interesting.

I also write about my passions, which are my sources of profound spiritual renewal and deep meaning, through dance and cross country skiing. We hear so much wailing about how lost and unrooted Americans feel in this consumer culture, or whatever prevailing lament over American Anomie sloshes through the media. I feel I have something to add to that conversation.

Finally, I write about politics and culture. I am not interested in the day to day headlines but rather the trends and assumptions underlying them, the themes that persist but don’t hold up under scrutiny. I write screeds and diatribes as a way of processing my frustration over the way our cultural gestalt seems to reflect our worst rather than our best human attributes.

Why The Horno

In front of my house in northern New Mexico, I have an “horno,” an outdoor beehive-shaped oven made of adobe bricks and plastered with mud. It is heated with wood, traditionally fragrant and crisp-burning cedar wood. It’s hard to control the temperature, it can get as high as 700 degrees (F) and then it steadily cools over the next hours, so your pizza can be turned into black cracker or a soggy sponge depending on conditions. Or if you are lucky, it comes out perfect.

So it is with my thoughts and my writing them down. Sometimes I get lucky.