MountainMornings

I love it when writers write about writing. I want to hear where they write, and when; is it first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee, or deep into the night with a glass of wine? Once i even bought a calendar that featured the desks of famous writers. I would scrutinize the still life each month like it was a new moon. After all, if Eudora Welty could create amid chaos, I should certainly find my muse on a white oak built-in…

And it was this morbid curiosity that led me to join the twitter-sphere. Yes, I know i said i’d never do it. Feeling like the queen of 500 words or less, what could I possibly say in 140 characters or less, including spaces? Exactly. I had an aversion that seemed nonsensical. Wasn’t I the friend who taught my friends to text so they could communicate with their newly departed college-bound children? Didn’t I have to teach my teaching peers how to incorporate technology into their lesson plans? 

Still tweeting was a non sequitur to me. I admit I wondered at the value, and not wanting anymore emails popping up in my inbox. Who would I follow, or worse yet, who would want to follow me? I heard about the American kid who was arrested in Tahir Square, and because he tweeted in real time about being stuffed into a van his family was able to free him. A tweet can transform itself into a gps-driven life raft! But that wasn’t the reason I gave in and joined.

I wanted to sign up to a writing site called “Medium.” https://medium.com Its subtext is : “Sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward.” So there you have it…the only way to sign up was with a twitter account, pragmatism wins in the end. The Writer House in my town was offering a class this weekend on using twitter effectively, as a writer, and I thought to myself – what writer can’t craft 140 characters? Then I thought it’s like surgery, sending out a tweet is distilling your innermost thoughts in some rational and possibly humorous way. Something that might catch someone’s attention, might make you stop amid all the noise of day to day existence, and think.

Virginia Woolf said: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel…Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Our minds are permeable, some more than others. Bob and I had the pleasure of witnessing 2 young children experience a Cirque du Soleil performance for the first time, and I marveled at how their imagination was captured by aerialists in silk ribbons. The purity of music and motion, without words of any kind. IF I had downloaded the twitter App to my phone, I might have said: ” Quidam makes magic reel” because a part of the show uses mime and audience members to produce a silent film. And seeing the look of wonder in the eyes of children at a circus is magical. Even digital native children!

Chilling words: “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”