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?
Whadya got: