Quiet monologue

A couple of posts ago I was speculating about the motivation for writing this blog. I said it was an affirmation - a way of giving a particular kind of creativity permission to exist alongside struggle, compromise and pain.

When I told someone about it some weeks ago, I felt self-conscious, suspicious of my motives. The person I was talking to suggested that it wasn't necessarily egotistical, but a search for dialogue.

Having had no dialogue so far, however, and despite my encouraging any potential readers to comment, I now feel very grateful for the lack of comments. Comments would be interesting. They would also take the conversation off in new directions. The lack of comments allows me to quietly follow a thread of ideas through time, at my own pace, undisturbed by other people's interpretations, or desire to share experience.

The lack of response is a liberation for what Dyer calls 'the dependent mind' - the mind which, when receiving praise, is encouraged to act in ways that will generate more praise, and which, when receiving criticism, tries even harder to prove other people wrong. Both ways, you're being directed by forces outside of yourself. 

People may read, or they may not read. But the process of taking a single idea, pinning it to an image, and writing something quite short (potentially public, but silently so) continues to give me a new kind of creative satisfaction.