Franklin calls me on my shit. When my whining exceeds the limits of propriety, he pulls me over to issue a helpful warning. When I don’t quite understand how lost I’ve become, he points me home. He fairly steadfastly refuses to tell me what I really should do, but he can look down his nose at me, and even on a stop-action Hangout^® display, I can see that he’s caught me out. Shortly thereafter, I catch myself out, too.

Authoring involves an awful lot of foiled self-deception and foibling self disclosure. It shaves the old pig until it squeals and scurries home. Home isn’t just where the heart resides; it sits smack dab in the center of the universe. Franklin insists that the key to universality lies hidden in the deeply personal. The more personal, the more likely others are to find themselves peeking out through the prose. The one thing we all have in common might be that we all experience the personal, and we each recognize the presence of the universal in that seemingly least-likely place.

Just like you, I’ve wandered the backside of this Earth searching for connections, only to find them sitting in my rocking chair, smiling softly, when I stumbled back home. I’ve forsaken the familiar as tainted, rejected the routine as blasé, and traded dozens of reliable cows for thousands of magic beans, only to learn then relearn what I might have recognized all along. The universal exists everywhere. Even here.

I suppose my machinations meant I was merely seeking identity, but what was I thinking to search so far removed from the very thing I was searching for? I unavoidably carried the very thing I went looking for. I’d unknowingly packed it in the quartered handkerchief I’d tied to that willow sprig I’d then laid back across my shoulder for the trek. My destination stalking me stalking it; perfectly Escher-like.

Should I stumble upon the universal, how would I recognize his face? There is no us or them, only me and you; each of us resonating a strangely similar song. The posturing and posing easily distracts attention from the conveniently placed mirror right here. My story might be plenty significant enough, resonating the same realizations your story reverberates. I needn’t mine your motherload when my mine holds the same vein.

©2013 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting, BriefConsulting