My Skeleton Key

San Tiago, Spain. 2019.

It’s been a long time coming…this blog writing thing. In full transparency, blog writing is nothing but an excuse for me to actually write. And I have no grand aspirations to be read by many, only by the few that I know will take the time because they care for me as a person.

Many moons ago, when I didn’t have an actual job but owned a pink Dell laptop, I spent many an hour perched on coffee shop bar benches, tapping on my keyboard, busy being a writer. Those were perhaps the happiest and loneliest days of my life. The whole thing lasted a whole year and as a result, I wrote a book of sorts. A full-length novel that I had two or three friends of mine suffer through as they fixed my acronyms and prepositions. Prepositions being the hardest for me, even after twenty-some years in the States and actually being paid now to write marketing things.

The book — a fabulation of childhood memories, my deep-rooted Christian upbringing, and some simple fiction — never really saw the light of day, but the act of writing did work as a skeleton key for me to suddenly open doors to better understanding myself and the world around me.

Writing is powerful stuff, even if you are the only one reading it. It serves as a catalyst for experiences to gather their flavors and colors, and it imprints lived life in a way that cannot be replicated. A song, before being a song, was just an idea, and then it became words on paper. A film, before being a film, was perhaps a story floating on air, and then it became pages of script. Even paintings and sculptures have their pre-birth as notes on an artist’s diary. Words are powerful stuff.

But life sometimes takes its own course and what is important, essential even, gets forgotten as fires of daily crisis burn our attention into exhaustion. As children come into this world and demand your attention. As work rings its incessant bell in your computer and phone. As relationships, much like the ocean, push their way into the shores of you day to day, permeating your ground until it is saturated. And so I am not alone in the fact that life took over and I have not until very recently, started to write again - skeleton key, dusty with lack of use, had to be rescued from the depths of my own busyness, procrastination, and excuses.

I don’t have a specific goal in terms of how much I can and will write. I don’t even have the aspiration to write well; honestly, typos are a thing that just happens to me. And yet, I think any effort, given the neck-breaking speed in which I often move, is a good effort.

So this is a start. Starting this site is an actual big step. It is all the things I am not comfortable with - public, open, in-real time, and vulnerable. It is also many things that I love and makes my heart sing - a time for introspection, an opportunity to share, and a chance to read from myself so I can know myself better.

I can feel the key turning. A new door opening.

-jm