I am sitting in my small lounge in my mountain house writing these words. It’s Sunday afternoon. There’s psychedelic trance music playing in the background, compliments of my new friend Angelica. I find the music strangely appealing, but I don’t think that I will be quick to trade in my David Gray and Cranberries albums for this kind of music anytime soon.

Last week Wednesday, during my “at-home-ness” experiment, I took my canoe onto one of the dams in front of my house. I haven’t done it for a couple of months, and I thought it a good way to end my day as the sun started to fade behind the mountain horizon.

As I approached the rickety jetty from which I usually launch myself into the water, I saw the figure of an angel strolling gracefully upon it. Ok, she wasn’t an angel, but she had me fooled for a moment. Her name, as I would soon learn, is Katya, and she was visiting from Ukraine.

My weeklong experiment of “at-home-ness” of which I wrote in the previous post has once again unclogged certain realizations in my life. It’s amazing how a little soul searching can go a long way in contributing towards one’s well-being and sanity.

It’s been a year since I moved to the mountains of Haenertsburg, and since the onset it has been my intention to fill my life with more solitude and quiet so that I may, in the words of Thoreau in Walden Pond, “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Last week I made a deliberate attempt to stay at home for the entire week. No business trips. No out of town sleepovers. No faraway breakaways or golf trips. What I needed was to be at home in my own house, my own environment, my own skin.

For some people it is a no-brainer to sleep in their own bed for seven consecutive nights. For others, like me, it is an accomplishment. Ever since my student days I’ve been hooked on wanderlust. I remember one year where three months passed in which I was home for only 1 or 2 weekends, spending all the other weekends anywhere but home, staying at home during the week only to attend classes and work.

And so we’ve come to my third and final resolve:

I will write as a means of serving others.  I am calling this the outward movement of my writing.

In the love-shaped world of Jesus, laying down one’s life in service to others takes top priority. The word ministry originally meant nothing more and nothing less than selflessly serving others, but when I look at the two worlds in which this word is generally used today – the world of politics and the world of religion – this word has definitely been raped.

My second resolve is this:

I will write as a means of loving myself enough to become fully human. I call this the inward movement of my writing.

It may sound a bit strange to say that I am writing in order to love myself. I would be the first to admit that it conjures up images of arrogant celebrities revelling in the attention of other lower life forms. But hear me out.

The next few posts I am going to explore the three part resolve about my writing as set forth in the previous blog post. I am doing this first and foremost for myself. If anybody reads this and gains from it, my heart will be glad.

Resolve number one:

I will write, primarily, as a way to discern and strengthen my union with God. Drawing on the wisdom of Henri Nouwen, I call this the upward movement of my writing.

The last few months I have undergone I metamorphoses of sorts in regards to my writing. Here’s my story.

I used to really love writing. As in REALLY. LOVE. WRITING. I used to disappear for days on end with little more than my Bible, my journal, a pen and a Little Oxford Dictionary to keep me company. I missed appointments, forfeited opportunities and cut back on anything distracting or destructive for the simple chance of writing a few words on a piece of paper than no one except me and the Almighty knew about. Writing used to be sacred and transformative, nothing less than an act of saving grace. (To see more about my passion for words, check out the About Me page on my website, penned in a time when I still really loved to write.)