I blog, therefore I am

Last count: 93 million bloggers. Make that 93,000,001. I have a hard time believing that if there were even 93 bloggers someone would give a rat's you-know-what about what I have to say. And, yet, presumably 93 million other human beings thought they mattered enough to go public with their thoughts. This is striking to me! Not that people should feel confident that "they matter," but that they are bold enough to make the declaration publicly.

I'm born of the "children should be seen and not heard" era of parenting. When the bold and opinionated Karen begins to feel her emotions percolating, her still small voice reaches for the paddle on top of the refrigerator. Until recently. That's when I discovered that clinging to my "silence is golden" credo is really untested. How unfortunate for those closest to me. Perhaps my fellow bloggers never had this speech impediment, or they too fought through it.

What made me do it? Fight through it, I mean. The scales tipped. In my lifetime I have witnessed firsthand the erosion of "the village"--you know the one--the one that is supposed to help raise our children. My life's questions have been answered on the fly. It isn't that I haven't asked for advice. But, have you noticed how busy people are? Rhetorical, no need to respond. Gone are the days of people dedicating time for the sake of someone else's well-being. That's called building a relationship. That's what therapists are for, right?

The scales tipped when my ongoing journey in search of my very own village passed the billboard saying "The people have spoken and they say, 'It's not my job.'" True story--As a last ditch attempt to get some pressing life-sized questions answered, I joined an online community which offered personal mentoring beyond the normal discussion board content. I was paired up with "Emily" who had a bio and thread contributions which seemed to reflect someone of similar values and status as myself. Let's just cut to the end of the story which came rather quickly--two weeks later to be exact. When I hadn't heard back from Emily, I e-mailed the community host to see if there had been an error. I soon received a forwarded response that regretfully notified me that Emily didn't have time to dedicate to me. It's worth noting that there was no offer to pair me up with anyone else.

You may be wondering just how needy I am. I've been told I'm anti-dependent. The person who told me this was a therapist who said I didn't depend on him enough. Hey, I was seeing a therapist, wasn't there some implicit level of dependence in that decision? Experts presumably have the breadth and depth in knowledge and experience to get paid for their advice. Is that what life has come to: paying for wisdom? Well, I'm not going to sit back and watch our villages crumble into dusty relics of better days. I'm going to re-build, restore, refurbish, revive our social community and I'd like to do it with your help.

Let Wisdom Ring is a community for people to share their wisdom--their knowledge, experience and lessons--to lift people from our "rising to the lowest common denominator" morass. I hope on these pages we will "raise the lowest common denominator" making us part of a more vibrant, hopeful, self-actualizing community. It won't be our village without you.