I’m tired tonight, like I have been almost every night for the past ten months. My heart is so awake though that no matter how hard I try I can’t fall asleep. I don’t know why I am so busy in my brain. But here I am 3:49 am laying in bed making speeches in my head about a thousand things I’m contemplating.

How do you make a speech? How do you write a blog? Or a book?

Well in my sort of reckless fashion I just start with a question I can’t answer and then I ramble around until I’ve said so much that, there in the midst of the rambling, is a bunch of foolishness that I have labeled ‘honesty’ and then also bits of truth that have the faint aroma of some sort of answer. An answer that is caught up in heaven somewhere and light breezes of the answer are blowing past randomly in the ranting I’m doing here on earth… But it’s only a glimpse of something concrete.

I used to scream. And when I did, it was all about ‘THIS IS THE TRUTH!” “LISTEN OR DIE!”

And Now if I scream, its usually, “I DON’T KNOW THE ANSWERS!” “GOD HELP ME! I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!”

Is this because I’m getting smarter or dumber? Maybe being dumb actually makes us smarter. But the moment we become smarter, we get our feet under us, put all our weight into those smart legs, raise up our heads, only to wobble around violently, until we find ourselves flat on our faces, crying a little because we learned that we haven’t learned much.

And it is there on our faces that we are closest to some tiny exhale of understanding.

I know a girl who is a great writer. I know she’s a great writer because she talks too much. And yea, she needs like, bulldozers worth of editing to get to the heart of what she is saying. That’s because she is like me. She thinks in circles.

She probably used to be a good liar. So she knows all the arguments that people have when she says anything. So she is always defending herself from her own arguments. Although the listener is usually thinking, “Why is she over explaining? I’m not arguing with her about any of this.”

But if she would sit down. Write all that stuff out. I know that she would find truly great writing in the midst of it. IF only she could absolutely let all the junk, that needs edited out, go. Then she could find her voice as a writer.

Maybe it is the fact that we are willing to let go of our ‘best’ work, because it’s either eternally worthless, or redundant, or arrogant, or just irrelevant… maybe its being willing to let go and admit ‘we don’t know’ that makes us a good communicator.  Are there good times for brain vomit? Yes. Is there an appropriate place to share our brain vomit with others? I’m sure there is. Like with God. Diaries. Maybe now, here, for me, it is only good because I am vomiting as an example. But most of the time, maybe, we should edit our selves down a bit, use the delete button a lot, put on some decent clothes, and think through what we are communicating before we send it out there.

Then again, if I know for sure that this is true, (THIS IS TRUTH! LISTEN OR DIE!) which I don’t, then perhaps there are very good examples out there, besides this one, of why it isn’t always true. (GOD HELP ME! I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!)