for my writer friends (a comment from a reader)

this is something I didn't intend to write I guess I was called... if you find it long or boring, bye bye not important at all keith Lacking Internal Support is My Muse or Blurring Call & Response or Inside is Better than Outside Keith Hennessy Responds to Cynthia Lambs blog, Calliopes Call Dec 2008 Hi Cynthia, On your blog I found an observation, one might even call it a philosophy or ideology, about the importance of finding internal support, suggesting that external support follows internal support. You counseled another writer with: "I can't think of one person who found success without first finding it within." In general I disagree with this. It is not what I observe about myself nor is it a philosophy that I subscribe to. I think that there is a symbiotic relationship between the in and the out, a mobius strip where one becomes the other in a simple twist of the road. Or I could speak of the fuzzy, vague or contaminated border between in and out. In La Frontera (Borderlands, 1987) Gloria Anzalda reframes the border from line to territory, offering the image of the border as a fertile swamp. She is talking about the US-Mexico border as much as she is writing about the distance between you and I. I recognize these borderlands (these no-mans-land) as the most fertile space from which to create. This friction, ambivalence, chaos is my muse or possibly it is the time/space where I find her. I look for the complicated places between private and public, between and beyond the personal and political. Thats where I write, alone, yet dependent on external support or calling. Your statement echoes what I consider one of the most stale and potentially deadly of new age ideas: that one must love oneself before being loved by another, that one must learn to feed oneself before taking time to serve others, etcetera in a thousand variations that locate the individual as a crucial site for healing before focusing on the healing of the community or planet. Just last night I was in a sweet and deep heart circle with a community of new and old friends. One person shared the phenomenon that she was only realizing her right to exist, that she had something to offer, through the validation that she received from those who she admired and looked up to. So much of our identity, and not just surface identity, comes from our interaction (however violent or respectful) with the world around us. If you have food issues, go and work at a soup kitchen. By learning to feed others one might re-learn how to feed oneself. Same same for healing, writing, loving. Take the focus off the self, at least sometimes. As I enter and exit my home I look at a framed sign on the wall, which reads, "I think I could get some needs met by helping others. I think you're right!" As for writing, I barely consider myself a writer. I have almost no internal support for writing. External success and acknowledgement is absolutely critical for me. Mostly I can't complete any writing unless there is a request and a deadline imposed from outside forces. In fact, this letter surprises me because usually I just think these things and never put them to the page or screen. Internally I am a failure as a writer. I have no 'practice', minimal confidence, and infrequent vision. And yet somehow a few times a year I vomit onto the page and it gets heard or read by hundreds if not thousands of people. Often I get paid for this purging. I want to play contrarian to the idea that internal is a source superior to external. It's not how I see the world and it's not what works for me. I often begin projects outside my personal concerns and then, over time, the issue and the project work themselves into me. I go from the outside towards the inside as much or more as the other direction. And mostly, in a post-modern theory kind of way, I reject the idea that there is an inside, an authentic, or even a self that could ever be separate or distinct from the outside, the performed, or the social context. As much as I respect your call, and as much as I remember when I thought I'd been called, I now consider all calls to be a fusion of social construct, psychological projection, physical sensation, karmic or fated plan, ancestral intelligence and spiritual mystery... basically a mess spreading or leaking in several directions at the same time. Definitely not an articulate vision moving in a particular direction. If I write at all, that's where it comes from. Its possible that I have taken your words out of context and that this argument is irrelevant to what you were trying to say about internal support. This tangential and spiraling writing, blurring the relationship of call and response, becomes yet another example of what Im trying to argue. Thanks for calling. Respectfully and sincerely, Keith