writing

Can be healing. I always wrote to try to understand myself and the world and my place in it better. I was always very intelligent like my father and very intuitive like my mother. As a young child listening to people's thoughts I found troubling and it wasn't until I was 15 that I realized why people thought one thing but always said another.

It's about politeness which is what allows civilization to exist at all. If everyone said exactly what they felt and thought all the time we would be beating each other up and killing each other at a much higher rate than we do now. For example, people were much more direct in the 1950s and were not afraid of confrontation because violence was pretty common just not with guns. So, it wasn't unusual for people to get into fist fights over politics and religion so you had to be very careful what you said at school even in grade school because what you said to others often could get you put in the hospital or kill you then.

Knives were common in Grade School and High School then and I saw knife fights in high school sometimes at lunch. But, it was thought bad form then and very low class to use a gun in a fight because only mobsters did that and no one wanted to be thought of that way then in the 1950s and 1960s.

So, writing when I started writing for myself in the early 1950s was doodling and writing on pieces of paper and especially spiral notebooks I used for school. I would write to understand myself and other people and the world better and how I might fit into this world. I still do that now as a 71 year old but now I guess I'm just 65 years more sophisticated than I was at 6 or 7 years old.

So, I believe writing can heal your soul and keep you alive. So, I write to heal myself and others sort of like my minister parents would too. I was taught to counsel people starting about age 6 when my parents were put in charge of a church in downtown Los Angeles on Hope street.

So, writing was always a way to heal myself and the world around me because I was always taught to pray for everyone in the world which I still do now at 71. But now, my prayers are far more powerful and sophisticated than they were then after studying many methods around the world in how to help and to heal others.

By God's Grace