What to say...

I haven't been blogging much lately, as you may have noticed.

There are two reasons, mainly. One is my schedule. I just haven't been reading as much as I'd like, thinking as consistently or as thoroughly as I'd prefer, or even taking much notice of the passage of time and the insignificant events of my own life. For some reason (vanity vanity vanity), I prefer not to write if I can't at least come up with some speck of substance, no matter how faint.

The other is an even deeper sense of shame. In a time of war, I feel as if... if I'm to say something, it ought to be something that matters. I ought to know what I'm talking about. I ought to be articulate. Trivial is unbecoming, it seems to me. But what would would be becoming? I don't have an answer to that question, and so I've fallen silent. When I have moments of peace and contentment (as this afternoon, when I lay for two hours in my boyfriend's arms) I wonder how I can, in good conscience, speak of private happiness or petty difficulties in a excruciatingly sad and troubled world.

I had lunch today with a friend from church, who recently spent many months in Ramallah. Her views on Israel and the Middle East are strong, and informed by personal experience. She is vehemently against the war in Iraq, but as we talked, more nuance was revealed in her attitude as I was candid with her about my own confusion and ambivalence. In the end, I told her, about the only way I feel I can contribute unequivocally is in advocating access to information and the cultivation of true conversation between individuals, communities, institutions, peoples, and ultimately nations. So then, I asked myself, how do I help by being silent? Not much, except by not decreasing the signal to noise ratio ~ and that's a contribution by omission, not commision, and not particularly meaningful.

AF (vigorously, by the way, anti-war) lived through Tienanmen Square. He saw his government turn tanks on his friends and fellow-students. He left China immediately afterwards, and didn't return for nine years. He has helped me to understand, a little, that for people who grow up in an environment where the state controls all you know, even encountering one small piece of alternate information can be either deeply disturbing, terrifying, or create such cognitive dissonance as to require utter denial. What doesn't fit into a person's world-view can almost not be seen.

I am not a journalist, a reporter, or a prosletyzer. I have no aspirations to persuade, to explicate, or to document facts. But I do believe that telling the truth about oneself opens the door for others to do the same. When we share what is in our hearts and minds, even when it is mundane, we are showing the possibilities of the human condition. It also makes it possible for others to see themselves in us, or to understand our differences more completely (perhaps even with sympathy).

So I'm swallowing a bit of my own grandiosity and hoping to just get on with it. Don't expect too much from me. Just as I know I have nothing especially important to say, I believe that conversation is a good in itself ~ and even though it's a relatively new and curiously asynchronous medium, the weblog and the web provide another opportunity for conversation. I promise that as we talk, I will listen with respect.