Soul Satisfaction

Well, it’s been almost two months since I’ve contributed a post, and one kind reader (I seem to have one or two) suggested it might be time for another, so here goes.

My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.

Where do I go from here?

Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.

Maybe it's time to somehow change that.

I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.

Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.

Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.

Here’s a list of things I don’t like.

I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.

I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.

I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.

How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.

In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.

I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.

I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.

You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.

Stay tuned.