A Why, a Welcome and a Worldbuilding Proposal

I'm glad you're here.

I’m a spiritual writer.

Or, at least, I write a lot of spirituality: Searching for the Holy lurking in all things. Making meaning out of random, silly, even trivial events. Muddling about in the dark fumbling for a switch, match, flashlight, headlamp, strand of blinking Christmas lights.

That sort of thing.

This is not a series on spirituality. Not entirely, at least. I mean, spirituality inevitably pops up, peeks around the corners, catches your wayward eye and then takes off cackling down the hallway.

Even if you don’t chase after it, you still saw it. It’s there, in the backdrop. You hear those giggles echoing off the walls.

That’s God, I think. Delighting in simply having seen you. Hoping—beckoning—you to follow, to share in that delight.    

But this isn’t a series on spirituality. And here’s why: Spiritual writing demands something of a bow. A neat, tidy package placed politely on your front porch, the ding dong of the mail carrier ringing in your ears as you open the door and say, “Oh! For me? How wonderful! I didn’t even know I’d been expecting this!”

Spiritual writing demands a message, a point, a purpose. A rummaging about in the mess and muddle, the discovery of that glistening gem of hoped-for insight. The writer—me, I guess—dusts it off, holds it up, offers it to the reader. “What do you think of this? This is what I found in my own mess and muddle. Maybe it’s there in yours, too.”

This series will offer few polished gems. I can guarantee no more than a promising pile of dirt.

Why? Because that’s part of the journey, too. Often, as I rummage about in my life—the nitty-gritty details, the stories and pop culture and parenting snafus—those gems of insight prove elusive. But there’s still something here, something that is calling to something in me. Something that seems important, meaningful, significant…but I just can’t say why. I just can’t make sense of it.

Not yet, at least.

There’s no neatly tied bow on this package. Rather, the mail carrier dropped it in the garden, and it’s been raining all night, and I’m out of town for the week anyway. We’ll all be lucky if the squirrels don’t carry it off.

Photo by Pearse O'Halloran on Unsplash

If you ever watch The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, you probably have seen his segment “Meanwhile.” The whole gist of the piece is that, after he and his writers have drafted the perfect monologue to open the night’s show, they find all these scraps still left over. Stories. Jokes. Glimpses into the signs of the time. But they don’t quite fit; they don’t quite connect or add up or make sense or contribute to the whole.

But they’re still pointing to something. They’re still worth spending time with.

That’s what this series will be. Because I’ll bet there are plenty of story scraps in your life, too, as there are in mine. I’ll bet there are plenty of moments, snippets of conversations, gut feelings and movie-going delights that cause you to pause and say, “Well now. That was something.”

But what? And why?

Let me hazard a guess—and this here now is the real project of this series of story scraps. A while back I wrote an essay on worldbuilding and spirituality. In short, I was grasping for a why behind my own love of speculative storytelling—Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and the like.

And what I came up with was this: Every little detail, every little encounter, every little insight into self and others, is an exercise in worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, in a fantasy story, for example, is the work done by an author to create a real place—history, language, culture, etc.—out of a fairy tale. To do it right, to do it well, the author and the reader both need to pay close attention to the random details, the trivial moments, the odd backward glance that seems to be nothing more than poor editing.

But it wasn’t poor editing. It was intentional. It was lifelike.

In short, it all adds up. But it often doesn’t make sense until the end—or damn near close.

Photo by Haley Owens on Unsplash

That’s the project here: to take those story scraps of my life, of what I see and sense and feel, and offer them up as bits of a worldbuilding project. No necessary moral or lesson or deep insight. Just an abiding trust that this stuff, this raw material, is part of something more, pointing to something greater.

And I hope that in the doing, in the writing, in the sharing, you’ll see more clearly the raw material, the stuff, of your own worldbuilding endeavors. Your own life: where it’s going and why. That those scraps of story shouldn’t be so casually discarded but held close, held sacred, as breadcrumbs deeper into who you are and who you might yet be in and for this world.

Alright. This might be sort of a spirituality project.

But anyway: Welcome.

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