View From The Glen

Friday, March 12, 2010

Letting in the light

Ask any of my writer friends and they’ll tell you.

That I like happy endings. That I like uplifting stories. That I am a seeker of light.

(If you want a blog like that, you'll have to read yesterday's post on Fairies. Or check back tomorrow.)

In life, I know bad shit happens, but in my writing, in my reading, on my blog, I want to find the positive angle. I want to be left believing that there is hope.

But there are days, oh yes there are, when I just can’t see it.
  • When I hear of the couple in the UK who starved their baby daughter to death because they spent all their time at an internet café caring for a virtual baby. Or the mother who webcast….no, I can’t even talk about that one.
  • When I hear of the horrors inflicted on innocent people by suicide bombers. When I think of the children without food or clean water around the globe
  • When I hear of bodies being found, of police officers being killed for doing their job, of senseless kidnappings, of the beating of a man in a wheelchair.
  • When I hear of people just giving up, jumping off the bridge. Or of people who want desperately to live dying of cancer/aneurisms/heart disease before their time.
On a day like today when I already feel despairing - for reasons nowhere near as big and awful as any of these - these threads converge brutally and threaten to crash down.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I feel cracked, broken, empty. What saves me, today at least (alongside the sympathy of the world’s greatest mother-in-law) is something I read on my friend Betty’s blog, one of those little nuggets of perfectly timed wisdom.

On Twitter I passed it on: Feel like I'm cracking up - and am holding tenuously to a friend's belief that cracks are important because they let in the light.

I have to tell you, I was overwhelmed by the support of the on-line community. People I have never met, some I’ve never even heard of.

And the day got a little bit brighter.

2 comments:

Leanne Haines said...

Just reading this now, and I wish I had been able to add a ray of my own light to your misery last week. I've cracked up a few times myself over the past few days (comes naturally with living in close proximity to mountains of unopened boxes and far from family and friends), but your comment about "letting in the light" has helped! I hope you're feeling better. I'm so glad to be "connected" to the world once again, finally. I had many blogs to catch up on!

Anonymous said...

It is useful to try everything in practice anyway and I like that here it's always possible to find something new. :)