In a small room in an outbuilding of the Hubbard Hall Arts Center in Cambridge, N.Y. this morning – our little classroom theater was closed due to rains – some lights were lit, some creative souls came together to find their voices, start some blogs.

One student  – Melissa Carll – helps run a nature preserve and is seeking to improve their blog, another, Jim Reid, is a former Protestant Bishop who wants to write about ageing and retirement, a massage therapist named Mandy Meyer-Hill wants to find her voice and use her blog to help people heal, Athena Burke, a well-known singer and spiritualist, wants to build an online community of music and affirmation,  two writers  – Lisa Dingle and Roger McManus – want to get published. Lisa Dingle, a member of the Open Group At Bedlam Farm,  is driving over three hours each Saturday to take the class – and some more students are coming next Saturday. The “Art Of The Blog” class is underway for the next four Saturday mornings.

I enjoy teaching small workshops, I love preaching that writing is not the province of the tormented few,  and I’m grateful to be supporting Hubbard Hall, the creative locus of our small upstate New York town. It is a great group of feeling and thinking and mindful people, we got far in two hours, we will go a lot farther.

One of the most interesting and anxious of the students was Elizabeth Nichols Ross, a Funeral Director, Minister and technophobe. She works in an industry everybody will use but nobody wants to talk about,  and she officiates at weddings as well of funerals. She wants to minister to both ends of life. She is not fearful about life or death but was nearly traumatized by the very idea of starting her own blog, she didn’t even know what a blog was. Elizabeth looked ashen during the class, baffled by the very idea of what a blog was, but she followed the simple and easy blog set-up  instructions written by Rachel Barlow, a gifted writer in her own right, a blogger and  student in my Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop and a technical whiz.

I know Elizabeth, she is thinking a lot about her life and where she wants it go, she is thinking a lot about life and death. She went home after the class, read Rachel’s wonderful instructions and put up her new blog in a few hours. Late this afternoon, “Celebrating Life And Death Along The Way” was launched. I believe in the power of the blog to give people voice, to connect them to like-minded souls, to change lives as my blog has changed mine. Elizabeth is warm, funny, honest and she will write about life and death in compelling and relevant and sad and funny ways, just the way she talks about it. I was moved the class, by the student’s spirit and yearning to communicate.

Life is a daily opportunity and we can live it in fear and anger and resentment or we can live it. I look forward to the other candles being lit, one by one, to the other voices being raised, to the other ideas and emotions being shared and finding their place in the world. I told the students that blogs are a coming out, an affirmation of individuality. The class is a gift to me, and Elizabeth has given me the first present, lit the first candle. If you can, welcome her to this world, to the Ministry Of Encouragement. She has started off on a new chapter that just might alter her life, and the lives of others.