When i was a kid and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area I used to listen to a morning radio personality named Don Sherwood. He signed off his broadcasts with the saying, "Out of the mud grows a lotus."
I got the meaning even though it was much later that I discovered that it's a Zen saying.
Like a lot of kids I had a fair amount of mud in my life, and there wasn't yet much sign of any lotuses. The motto gave me a bit of hope.
So did Don Sherwood himself. Even though he was on the air from 6am to 9am, he hated mornings. He was often late and sometimes he didn't show up at all. He made fun of the commercials that indirectly paid his wage. He was sharp-tongued and funny and cynical. He had a smoker's cough and hangovers.
In short, he represented a spirit of rebellion I wasn't encountering much anywhere else in American culture. Listening to him in the mornings and watching the Steve Allen Show on TV at night when I should have been asleep suggested there might be more to life than the stifling Norman Rockwell world held up as the ideal. I was a boy with dark thoughts, but these things gave me some motive for hanging in there to see if that was true that it gets better. (It did.)
How does this relate to writing? Radio personalities and writers, among others, get to spread their message more than most. We'll never know what impact they may be having but if we're lucky there's somebody somewhere who reads our book or our blog and finds a spark of hope.
Don Sherwood passed away in 1983. I wonder whether he ever knew that he was kind of a lifeline for some of his listeners. I hope so.
And if anything we write can ever do that for somebody it makes it worth slogging through quite a bit of mud.
