What is it really all for anyway?

I was day-dreaming today as I made my way along a Shropshire lane on my way to teach creative writing to some excitable children.  What is this really all about I was asking myself, and what am I doing it for?  I was imagining that  I had achieved all the worldly goals: a house, financial security.  And if we had that for our family, and my husband’s music was bringing in a good salary, what then?  A cure for type 1?  That would be the next thing on my list.  And then my writing. Would I do it if I didn’t have to?  Would I teach after school clubs if we were comfortably well off?  Would I take hand-lettered commissions?  And I thought what I really seek is to be published. For someone to say, it is good enough, not for the endorsement, (though that is what it takes in traditional publishing,) but for the fact that my voice would be out there and that it would roll up on some strange shores and it would be a help and a homecoming to people at unexpected moments.  What I really long for, and what I write for is for my words to resonate with people, for others to read them and think ‘YES!’  I write to reflect life, the way that I see it, with all its curiosities and wonders.  And I love to hear when a blog post has meant something to someone, or when a poem has resonated with someone. I love it when my writing makes people cry, not that I like making people cry but that my writing speaks truth.

And so to my borrowed heart cry from Frederick Buechner, I want my writings to: ‘set [others] dreaming as well as thinking, to stir in [them] memories and longings and intuitions that [they] starve for without knowing that [they] starve’ (Listening to Your Life).

Sometimes it is good to daydream, to take money out of the equation (even if only for a short imagined moment), to think what am I really doing this all for anyway?, to re-centre ourselves.  Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way writes about finding your true north, about finding the why beneath the things that you do.  And for me it is something of shared humanity, of that connection.  What’s yours?