Creating vs. Reflecting

This past week I checked in with two of my most accomplished young women friends -- each articulate, savvy, inquisitive, spirited, curious, lively, and engaged. One is an internet researcher, the other a young lawyer turned law professor. Both think a lot about new technologies and the ways they should be used. In connecting with each, we talked briefly about blogging.

Each said something along the lines of , "I could NEVER blog. I wouldn't know what to say. Nothing I would think up to say would be very interesting or worthwhile."

??

Of course it's not true. What interests me is the belief that stifles each of them. I think it's something like, you need to know what you intend to say before you begin to blog, and you need to have a consistent, defensible, authoritative voice with which to opine about important matters. If those were the rules I wouldn't do it either. (And if those ARE the rules, please don't anyone tell the brass; I don't want to get kicked out.)

My favorite (for the time being) Rumi poem is titled something like the difference between Chinese art and Greek art. In it, the Greeks and the Chinese have a contest to see whose art is more beautiful. The king gives them a grand wing in the marble castle for them to install their art, divided in half by a big curtain, and gives them 30 days to get ready. The Chinese order in the finest silks of all colors, and get craftsmen and weavers at work all month on an enormous loom, producing a shimmering tapestry, infinitely detailed, crisp, and exquisitely colored. The Greeks, meanwhile, bring in buckets and mops and scrub brushes, and set to work on their half of the marble hall, scrubbing and buffing the stone. When the king comes in, he first enters the Chinese half and gasps with delight at the colors and designs, thinking, nothing could possibly come close to this beauty. But then they open the curtain, and the reflected light of the tapestry on the clean, pure marble walls is diffuse, transient, and lovely.

Some really nice people (and really smart) have emailed me in response to stuff I sort of blurted out here as I've been learning the ropes and finding my voice. It's exciting but it did paralyze me a little bit when I sat down to write this afternoon. I don't know what this blog will be about yet and now that I'm aware that people read it I don't want to disappoint. The only thing I can write about with any authority is me, and the only real predictable thing I can expect is to find life in general, and the practice of law specifically, confusing and exciting and stupid and stimulating and frustrating and elegant. I'll try to be honest and I'll try to write every day but I can't promise to be consistent, or articulate, or original. If I had to be all that stuff I'd get tongue tied and wouldn't be able to write at all.

I can't weave any fantastic tapestry here. I don't know enough, I'm not smart enough or patient enough to do that. There are lots of people busily working on that. The best I can hope for is to scrub away whatever pretentiousness or cynicism I have accumulated and reflect back as truly as I can the fascinating world as it changes shape around me.

Comments

[Jack Cliente]

Some of the most beautiful and treasured "tapestries" ever created are quilts made from scraps and discards, without the help of blueprints or famed artists.

[Patrix]

I really loved your analogy of the reflections of tapestry, i find it so close to my view of blogging in which little things that others don't even notice seems so obviously beautiful when viewed through the eyes of other "others".