Angela, thank you for sharing your thoughts. As I read you say "This made me think..." a light flickered on in my mind regarding the sort of conversation that our writings can hopefully "inspire." You are quite right about how consumed we can get with craft and aesthetics and miss life. The balance, to whatever extent possible, may be very helpful. I certainly descended into one extreme from around the time I was 18 until 25 when I believed my only purpose poetically was to be immersed in non-traditional experience (or what I thought might have been). One of the biggest examples being how I dropped out of college my sophomore year and tried just working and writing. Or in another case, heavy pot smoking or alcohol consumption, to take my mind away from the supposedly usual "consciousness" -- at the expense of a very unpleasant decade!

How much time to concentrate more on our aesthetic theories, either as writing subject or personal thought? Do you have any sort of approach to that? For most of my life I've actually feared getting too "meta," thinking I would alienate the non-creative writer. What do you think of the idea of us all as creative and critical writers to varying degrees? Some of us seeking to do it professionally and advance artistic notions very seriously, some just communicating or journaling or whathaveyou*?