Güd wrtr

My friend John Crandall signs his emails, “At your service,” which always makes me smile. He truly is a man in service to others—no, he is not a minister or chaplain or doctor, though he informally ministers to others all the time… not in a religious sense, but as a verb: “to give service, care or aid; attend, as to wants or necessities: to minister to the needs of the hungry” (dictionary.com).

He gives away so much of himself—as a writer and writing group facilitator, as a blacksmith, as a psychologist leading an anger management group, as cook/caterer, as husband to one and friend to so many others. And yet John would tell you, without a trace of irony, that this is what makes him happy, what fuels him, that in serving others he serves himself, too.

Some time ago I came across this quote by Jennifer Hoffman from “Uriel Heals”:

You are here to serve others, to be a light for them, to participate in their lessons and to help heal humanity. You are also here to serve yourself, to heal your karma, to enable your soul’s growth and reconnect to the Source. Your challenge is to find a balance between serving others and yourself so that you can accomplish the tasks that you established for yourself in this lifetime and even go beyond that. How you view your role in serving others is an important part of this process.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations With God books, sends free daily inspirations (sign up at http://www.nealedonaldwalsch.com), and I saved this one:

On this day of your life, dear friend, I believe God wants you to know that your job, your invitation from the Universe, is to give people back to themselves.

You can do this every day, in a hundred ways. Why not practice it with the first three people you encounter after reading this?

It is really a very easy thing to do, yet it can affect a person mightily. All you have to do is look for the best in that person, and then show it to him or her, right then and there. Describe it. Admire it. Thank him or her for it.

Do this for three people every day and watch how your whole life can change. At last you will realize what you are doing here. All the rest will be just stuff and nonsense.

This is the essence of what my friend John does—and what so many others do, too. Be a light for others. Give people back to themselves, as well as serving ourselves and healing our own karma. No small tasks. But really not difficult either.

Let’s try that, shall we? Let’s put it out there. Let’s ask every day: How may I serve? How can I find balance in serving others and myself? The ways will appear. I promise.

I just wanna say this is all my BF’s fault. I have read and enjoyed others’ blogs, but I was truly not thinking of doing my own until my BF started hers.

This is a woman who does not consider herself a writer, though in 1993 when she and I were wandering the California State Fair, she composed a personalized plate for my car: GUD WRTR. I protested, “I can’t put that on my car. People will think I’m bragging.” And she said, “Not spelled like that.” It’s still on my car.

She’s a hoot, my BF.

My BF and I became BFs in the late 1980s when she went off to college in Swansea, Wales, and asked me to write to her. “I’ll be your best friend,” she said, which made me laugh. I had no idea she was serious. Then the little thin, folded blue letters began arriving regularly, I began responding regularly, and we did, indeed, become best friends because of putting words on paper. In ink.

My BF started her blog because she’s been writing regularly with a writing group I host on Saturday mornings. Several people in that group have blogs, and though they are younger and way more hip than my 50-something BF and myself, it made sense to encourage writers to put their writing out into the ether.

My good friend Gina Spadafori, a nationally syndicated pet columnist, has an amazing blog (www.petconnection.com/blog) that covers everything from puppy mills to the best cars for dog hauling.  She and her colleagues—all volunteers—broke the huge story about the pet food recall in 2007. She dazzles me with her writing output and passion for writing about companion animals.

So I am coming late and somewhat reluctantly to this party, and I don’t know what to wear, much less what to say.  This is embarrassing for a professor of journalism at a community collage to admit. My journalism colleague at Sacramento City College, Dianne Heimer, is of a similar vintage, and she has her newswriting students blogging like mad. I don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t text much on my old-fashioned flip cell phone. It takes too long, among other things. A phone call is much faster. I do have a Twitter account, but I don’t use it, really. All this social media frankly befuddles me.

But I will be 52 at the end of July, and I hope to live a long life, so I figure that even someone with a half century under her belt can start to embrace these newfangled things.  I own a laptop, for heaven’s sake. Sure, it’s a five-year-old iBook G4, but I love it.

The Macs were not my idea originally, either. My late husband, Cliff Polland, talked me into spending $3,000 on a 512K Macintosh computer in 1984. We had just married a few months earlier, and we did not have an extra $3,000 in our lives. “I gotta typewriter,” I said.

And Cliff said, with such prescience it stunned me, “Toots, this is gonna change your life.” He was right. He set up a digital darkroom at his small-town newspaper before the Big Paper in the Big City Nearby did. He died before papers began using digital cameras every day, but he’d love that they do. New technology did not scare him a bit. And it didn’t take long before I was a huge champion of all things Apple. I still am. (iPhones intimidate me, but I have to say that from what I’ve seen of them, they look way cool.)

So thank you, Georgann, for urging me to Get With It and start my own blog. Thank you for helping me create this one. (You might want to check out my BF’s blog: emmaswan.wordpress.com. It has recipes and good photos, too.)

I can’t imagine that even six people will want to read any of this, but it’s time to practice what I preach to writing students again and again: Write it. Don’t fight it. Put it out there. See what happens. You never know. If nothing else, the blog will inspire you to keep you writing, if you’re lucky.

And anything to keep writing our art out is a good, good thing.