Reasons

I had just one person in mind when I started this blog in April 2005, and I am not that person.

Perhaps I began this blog for lost love.

Maybe I was thinking of a blessed soul happily traipsing through the mountains of Washington.

Maybe I was intent on touching the lover of beauty squeezed into the Tube in London.

Maybe I've been writing for the nephew who loves ideas, or the niece who believes ideas must be lived and not merely discussed.

Perhaps I had in mind some woman I once wished had been my girlfriend, or the woman I wish had not.

Maybe I have been writing solely for the friend in Boston who carries anger in a toolbox, or the poet of Oxford who disappeared in the fog off the coast of Dover, or that joyful man in Maine who leaps over pain with his unicycle, or that tall woman who talks to herself between stalks of corn.

Perhaps I had the weatherman in mind, who knows all about convection and adiabatic cooling -- and that there is no such thing as "heat lightning." Or perhaps, more simply, I had in mind that child whose mother died as I photographed the end of her story along an icy state highway.

Maybe I started all this for the atheist who used to pray with me in the dark nights of our many fears, that soul who has seen more of the worst of humanity than any soul should. Maybe I began tapping keys in the inaccessible reaches of the blogosphere for the Amish girl I once knew, or the boy I once assaulted with a fistful of elderberries while walking along Main Street when I was fourteen. Maybe I have in mind that boy who is now a powerful lawyer in the heart of the nation's capitol, the boy I used to pick on when we rode the school bus together as mere children -- the redness of his cheeks burning me even now with shame (for surely love tells me that I should have been his friend).

Maybe I am writing for a child who is still not ready to read, or the old woman who no longer can. Maybe I am writing for the blessing who taught me about the value of triangles, or the professor who helped me lift my chin (but not too high). Maybe I am writing for the drug-addled psychologist who shakes in disbelief now that he sees with vicious clarity why suicide is sometimes a seemingly viable antidote; or maybe that student whose trembling hand I held, her eyes shut in terror, as we traveled a chairlift to the top of a mountain; or the wonderfully witty woman, now dead, who from her wheelchair taught me how to cook when I'd visit her in the hours of degeneration.

Maybe when I lay my skis on edge and let myself settle into a deep arc carved on a slope on a bright winter day, I know that my tracks are for the person coming behind me; maybe I write in snow for someone who understands how snow warms the deepest reaches of the heart.

I will not say who it is I had in mind when I first registered this blog in April, 2005, nor will I say if my Muse (so to speak) has ever visited here. Just know that it is someone I will always love.

Peace,

BG