Coming Back to Life

Peace.

I've been reading that word a lot, folks commending the end of those bloggy hostilities.

And my most favorite result of all?

A healing.

A certain blog I'd given up for dead is back with us again. Alive. Alive and kickin'.

Livey, author of Northwoods Woman, http://northwoodswoman.blogspot.com/
started a blog when she didn't know how to write. She asked her blogdad, --How does one write?, and he told her, --Just like you're telling a story.

So she did.

She doesn't have a degree in English or creative writing. She says she's naive, and in some ways she is. She's quite intelligent, yet at the same time a bit unschooled, unpolished. She's lived in those north woods for many years, and I spent time in those exact same north woods as a child, camping and fishing. It's truly remote. You don't get a lot of exposure to big-city sophistication up there. I mean, that's the whole point.

In other ways, she's seen and been through things that are so terrible, other humans don't always survive them. There's some real-world exposure that can carve a person up like a piece of meat. Some live. Some don't.

She survived. Scarred, but alive. And she's been working on getting those wounds healed better, in a healthier way, for ten years now.

Me, I admire the hell out of her. She's got memories, issues, that would cause others to be vicious and mean, greedy and spiteful and destructive. The sort of thing you'd expect, maybe even forgive, even if you knew you couldn't condone that behavior.

But she didn't take that road. She's not like that.

About the worst she ever does is gets a little nuts sometimes. Most of us do, here in the 'sphere, and in the world. She's got way more reason than most.

She makes mistakes, social mistakes especially, and sometimes she does things she shouldn't. But she doesn't understand why they were wrong. Not yet. She's working on it. She does say - and I believe her - that she doesn't make these mistakes on purpose to hurt people.

Having made a lot of mistakes that same way myself, I'm perfectly willing to cut her a lot of slack. Especially when I see her trying so very hard to understand what happened.

Her heart is bigger than those big north woods, bigger than the huge night skies full of stars that you get to see up there. She is brave and tough, and fierce in defending the old folks she cares for in her work. She does this while carrying the burden of terrible physical health problems of her own. Constant pain is only the beginning.

She's an honest person, beyond what we usually see. A person who can hear very hard things said about herself, and then sit there and analyze it all, ready to accept what part of it is truth. She wants to figure it out, to be the best and the healthiest person she can be, and she never gives up the fight.

She almost changed the fight, lately, because she pretty much had to. I could see that. Even as a professional problem solver, I could not see any other solution. Not giving up, no, but changing it for her own protection.

Instead, she took part in a small miracle. Settled it. She's safe again, pretty much. As much as we can any of us expect to be, I guess.

And she's blogging again. And I am SO happy to see this.

Whatever your position on individual blogs and bloggers, one thing we say we condone is the freedom of speech and of expression that the internet, and this odd world we call the blogosphere, provide. If it's not to your taste? Read elsewhere.

To lose another unique voice from this world really would have been a sad, sad loss. Especially when it was so unnecessary.

Welcome back, Livey.