August 20, 1997

I Need a Voice

Celebrate this first issue of ZIGZAGS, the voice of me, Jim Hession. I need a voice. Too much is going on in my head and I need to be able to get it out. I need to share it for me and for you. There is something in the utterance which brings truth and clarity to a statement. While it is knocking around and bouncing of the sides of my brain it is not doing any one any good.

The enunciation, the evocation and even the exasperation are what give timber to the voice. And the timber, the sound and the aliveness lift me up. I do this for me. I hope that it also lifts you up. It is this sharing that we expand our circle of humanity. We rise and fall together.

I am indebted to Mary Catherine Bateson for the name ZIGZAGS. In Peripheral Visions (Harper Collins, New York 1994) she speaks of the “Zigzag people,” who are always changing and who are always starting over, again and again. I had always been taught that life would be a straight line on the graph always moving up or rising. And if I did not experience it this way, then somehow I had failed. I now know otherwise.

Life is all about change and adapting to change. The paths of life are zigzags. The cuts and turns look random but they are not. Zigzagging is the way to go. Remember, zigzags, seen from another angle, are rising spirals.