When you write something down it's different than simple thinking, the thoughts that run through the wakened mind.   It's as if something is allowed to happen in the blood brain barrier, the light of a wand opening an electrical current.  To write out a thought makes a thing tangible.

Jesus returns to his inner thoughts after the work of the loaves and the fishes, the work of managing his disciples to do an actual thing, which is not always easy, asking the busboy if he remembered, as he folds napkins, if he brought up hot water in the pitcher because someone needs tea on a cold day.  There's maybe even the element of marketing, which some people also find tedious.  "We're from Bergerac, and our wines are just as good as those of Bordeaux."

I attempt to write a small piece, a proposed wine column for a local paper, but in the morning the heart is not in the effort and would rather hide, to first write out what needs to be written, before looking at such a piece which could always use a little more work, a little extra cute-sifying.  Embarrassing to look at idiot sentences you wrote poking around, trying to locate something somewhere when really the whole of life is confusing and there's only, in the end, yin and yang.   Dostoevsky's wine column, sure.

What is going on in the mind of Jesus after the loaves and the fishes, after the masses can go on home.  Surprising how many sick people there are, the prevalence of epilepsy, paralysis, palsy, devil possession.   Apparently no effective single payer system, back then, and that's life, I guess.  The poor and sick came to make immediate demands, and then they stayed for the lecture, intrigued by the generosity of the healer, this man who wanted nothing in return, didn't need to build a pipeline for tracking oil first in order to "help" them out, gloriously enriching himself than allowing his beneficence to trickle down, after he'd made some offshore investments, after he and his buddies got rich while sinking the nation into foreign debt, so as ultimately make impossible any sort of, as they called it, welfare state, by which one means simple social security.  What was Jesus thinking as he went off to a desert place or a high place away from the crowds that had lined up for him which he dealt with one on one.  Sometimes he napped, on a cushion in the prow of the boat, just so his mind could do what he needed to do, which was, basically, writing, putting down some statements in a form by which others could repeat them, solidly remember them.


What do I have to do with any sort of wine column, Jesus would ask.  My thing is to write, to discover the essence of writing, that faith in it can cure all ills.  Preach the gospel, which is writing, which is writing itself, indicative of the very process, the greatest mirror held up toward writing there was at the time.  A monument to writing.  Faith.  Faith to sit down and scribble, to write in the dust on a daily basis.   Turn the other cheek, give away your robe, not a problem, not as long as you write, as long as you get back to your father in heaven, to your mountainside prophets, to your own Son of Man.

And maybe it is people like Dickens or Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway or Kurt Vonnegut or Philip  Roth who despite their faults understand the man the most, the catching of gospel light by the very act of writing...  Thus you can't really trust the hucksters, the televised mega church guys, because they are less involved with an actual daily creative self examining writing experiment.  They don't get up on the stage and say, "hey, how about that Hemingway guy writing that story 'Big Two-Hearted River' in which he hikes a long way, sets up camp, makes himself dinner under the stars, sleeps, cooks breakfast, goes fishing all day, and note how it's the concluding story of the whole cycle..."

A man findeth inspiration in honest work, inspiration not to quote but to write, not to prudishly interpret, self-importantly, but as discovery, as an increase of breadth and width of radiant energy, absorbed from the sun.

Simple low cost working man's healthcare:  write.