All Our Relatives

Image from Facebook

I tell him about a writer who, on publishing her 78th novel, said, when asked, “If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it and then her Tom comes in from work and she reads it to him and he cries too, that’s enough for me.”

Sterling Bennett

As we are searching for our subject it may happen that our subject is searching for us, no different from our best partner or friends or place or work. I doubt if I could make anyone cry with what I write, but maybe I can get a few people to nod their heads or stop and think.

I never thought ecology or the condition of the natural world was my subject, but it’s beginning to look like that subject itself thinks otherwise. I’m willing if I can take an artist’s approach to it in the sense of how images affect me emotionally. The problem for me is conveying that emotional impact in words.

In the above image of an animal I see embodied the soul of the world in all its pathos. I feel more than an aesthetic appreciation, I feel sympathy, empathy. I feel emotions I despair of being able to communicate. I’m not that good of a writer yet.

I hope to be that kind of writer someday.

Logic is less effective than emotion in communicating basic values to people, I…