I try to be light on my feet as a writer. Being more comfortable within the brief outline of an essay and never hamstrung as to what to say.

Because of that, I am easily bored with institutionalized words about enlightenment. They fill libraries with dust and make some of us sneeze. We need to get outdoors and breathe pure life.

The essays I write come from my own experience. Though I may not tell you in every essay, I have danced with death twice too many times. And so even if I am making you laugh, I am also making you cry. That is just how I roll.

I love hearing people speak from the heart and that rarely happens. Bob Weir was being interviewed by Dan Rather tonight on The Big Interview and I liked that a lot. Weir stuck to his story, which happens to be true. He is here to play music.

And I am here to write. I am an introverted essayist with too much time on her hands. I can’t write the great American novel or a thriller. I just write short and sweet.

Imagine stringing all of my essays together and then watching them float over the Grand Canyon. I have been writing that long. And it is all ephemera.

The soul grown so weary of weeping laughs for joy when someone reads an essay and says, “I know what she means. I know how she feels.” And I, probably sitting on the sofa with a crossword puzzle book on my lap smile. And know tomorrow I will string another group of words together. And they will mean something to someone that I will in all likelihood never meet.

If we did meet, the subject would not be enlightenment. I leave that to the pundits, which apparently think that explanations mean more than experience. Balderdash.

Vicki Woodyard