On writing

My wife and I retain on our bookshelf an invaluable volume of history. We have very little in our tiny little house. And that's a newlywed normality, I know. But we do feel a certain brand of pride when we browse the bookshelf that Kaylie's old roommates bought for us for our wedding. It's not only crammed with thousands of pages that, despite all the money forked out by my parents for all kinds of schooling, I daresay constitutes a formidable part of our education; it also is home to valuable reading's twin sister, meaningful writing. Our own meaningful writing. While I served a mission in China, Kaylie wrote me a letter every week. And I wrote back, well, almost every week. The gist and feel of the letters define the relationship between the two of us for those one-hundred-plus weeks, obviously unlike any other period of our relationship. They are supportive, full of love, some frustration, loaded with excitement, often times downright sorrowful, but mostly they are deeply, deeply spiritual. We keep them all on our bookshelf now, every single letter. As well as every photo, every envelope I fashioned out of other bits of paper when I couldn't buy more envelopes, every little piece of Chinese art I sent to her. Those letters were a great strength to me in my responsibilities then, and it was those letters that, upon seeing her at the airport when I came home, inspired me to buy her a ring on my third day home, and surprise her with it on the seventh. In brief, I owe my marriage, in part, to writing. 

    Joseph Smith once said, "The art of writing is one of the greatest blessings we enjoy. To cultivate it is our duty, and to use it is our privilege."

   Kaylie and I also both keep journals. She recently convinced me to get a blog. And she's quite a poet. We just love to write. There is something liberating about putting ink on paper and calling it your feelings, or the story of what happened today. It's like creating names for the colors inside a seashell. And to put a life -especially one's own- with all of its blunders and victories and occasional spells of boredom, on paper, is nothing short of, as the Prophet said, an art.