Something Human

I realized recently that, although I love to write and it's frequently the best way for me to think through things, I've been doing very little of it lately. The times in my life when I've written the most consistently have been the times when I've known I have to show my work to others on some sort of regular basis (in creative writing classes, for example). So I decided to start a blog. (I also write on our blog at work, hospitalsofhope.blogspot.com, but the subject matter of this will be a bit different.)

You may be wondering what, exactly, the title of my blog means. It comes from the poem "Home Burial" by Robert Frost (which is, by the way, a beautiful, heartbreaking poem and which you can read online). The poem tells the story of a couple that has lost their child. The husband is begging his wife to share her pain with him. "Let me into your grief," he asks. "Tell me about it if it's something human."

The poem is, to some degree at least, about human isolation and our failure to communicate with each other, to let others join us in our experience of the human condition. The human condition is something I think rather a lot about (it's sort of the subject matter of a lot of my graduate work), which means I'll probably be writing a lot about it on here.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living. / God's command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you." This is what I'm trying to do, to come out into the tempest of living--to learn how to be human.

One last note-- someone else started a blog with this name, once upon a time. They only wrote one post, and it was in 2006, so I don't feel too bad stealing the name, but please note the hyphen in the url. Otherwise, you'll go to their blog, not mine. And that would be very sad.