From Under the Rock

Dance-nik's right -- there's nothing like finishing that first draft of your new poem, song, story. It lets you know you're still heading up the right road, the road you didn't exactly choose for yourself, but here you are.

Writers don't ever know for sure, until they read it or play it or sing it for an audience, and they almost never can tell good from great. But when Plotnik turns over the right rock and the perfect rhyme jumps up and then falls under his fingers -- well, that's heaven.

Yesterday, Plot was finishing a story in which prayer figures at the end, kind of. The Great Plotnik has never been a very good prayer-er. But he has thought about it, wondered just what he would say to, you know, Him or Her, if he got the chance and they only gave him a few seconds, and he only could say one thing:

"There is no flash of light, but the insight comes to me as clearly as if I plucked it from a burning bush: there are a thousand religions in the world and none of the words matter, none of the prayers matter, none of the methods matter, the buildings, the shrines, the holy books written backwards, frontwards, upside down, the bending, the flailing, the flagellating, the pork or the no pork or the boxes on the head or the bonfires, or the cows that are sacred or the cows your grandmother turns into sauerbraten. None of it. There is only one thing every soul on Earth wants:

'JUST BE THERE, LORD.' The rest is all gravy."

OK, so he might change his mind tomorrow, but right now it feels pretty good, every bit as good as those fetuccini in chive oil and stir fried green beans from last night's feast.