Mediator-love goes 'round.

Part 1

Wow, I got blown away this morning when I checked my email to find a message from Geoff Sharp, a commercial mediator in New Zealand. First of all, his name sounds so familiar and I’m fairly sure I’ve come across it in my mediation studies several times. Second of all, a big fancy mediator from New Zealand emailed me to tell me he enjoyed my recent mediation post.

Thirdly, he actually wrote a post in his own blog, mediator blah… blah… about the passion in the mediation profession – starring my own little aspiring self.

What a morale-support. What a cause for inspiration. Thanks for the mediator-love, Geoff!

Part 2

On a slightly different topic, Geoff’s opening lines to his passion-post were:

This post from aspiring mediator, Eliesheva at lizrael update, a blogger poet from Jerusalem, Israel;

Two words in that sentence hit me as hard as Part 1 of this post: blogger poet.

I’ve been doing this blog thing since May 2004, and since the beginning I’ve gone through fits and starts of being uncomfortable with this new method of expression I had taken on. I was always the type to write it, store it, never look at it or show it to anyone else. I’ve been doing it for 11 years now, and I’ve got a pile of notebooks somewhere (hey, there used to not be computers). On one level, aside from communication pre-aliyah, starting this blog was to be an experiment in my ‘coming out’ as a writer, whatever that meant then and whatever it means now.

But I still had trouble being called ‘blogger’ because a good amount of what I write is not for you or them or anyone but me; it makes me laugh, it makes me smile, it makes me sad. But, again, that was defeating my own self-constructed purpose: to come out, to share, and most of all, to be challenged and to accept criticism, two things I often don’t allow myself.

Also, over the years this project has taught me a lot about who I am as a writer. There is a ton of stuff I don’t put here – short stories, pieces of larger stories, poems. But through this medium I’ve come to grips more and more with writer’s block, exercising my talent, learning about who I am (and who I am not) as a writer.

So blogger poet covers a lot of ground here. ‘Blogger’ – what a rough, course word; writing, barely copyediting, posting as you go… ‘Poet’ – soft, careful, expressive, creative.

Does that sum up what I’ve been doing here for nearly 3 years?


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Comments

  1. ilan Avatar
    ilan

    ‘Blogger poet.’ I like it. It’s got the ring of ‘warrior poet’ to it – pitting seeming opposites against each other – only in this case, confining them to the field of writing. Blogging, as you say, is hard and rash, expending words without caution, while (good) poetry tends to value every word, every turn of phrase.

    Perhaps truly good freeform writing is an amalgam of the two…

    Good stuff.

  2. ifyouwillit... Avatar
    ifyouwillit…

    A rightly deserved title. You’re blog is one of the few out there that shines through the hype of blogging and the bullsh*t some people publish in the name of opinion.

    The popularity of the blogsphere was a large factor behind my choice to blog less, but lizrael update has always been a quality read.

  3. eliesheva Avatar
    eliesheva

    Wow, thanks. I’d like to thank my mother… God… And the little voice in my head that makes me eat carrots dipped in ketchup sometimes.

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