I believe that writers ought to have a purpose to their writing, and I believe that human beings ought to have a purpose in their lives. This morning, a lovely message from Sandra, who chose to support my work by making a voluntary payment to the blog, and in support of my work.

“I’m supporting your work,” she wrote, “because it is needed. Your blog speaks to me, and many others, about the need to support the earth, and community, and animals. I was a former part of the problem; a seeker of money, and power, without a clear regard for how we are ravaging everything around us. We, as humans, are absolutely terrorizing, bullying, and polluting this world out of existence. We have to stop. You write well, and create a spark. It may be one of the many sparks that can lead to change. I’d like to say I was part of it. Thanks for the essay about Red today and about the Round House.”

Sandra send me $75.  She is part of it.

I did not really think of myself as creating sparks, except perhaps for the creative spark that exists in all of us, but it is a wonderfully inspiring image for me, and it is precisely what I hope to do and mean to do.

There was, of course, another message.

Yesterday, a woman named Nancy wrote on my Facebook page that she was not trying to be controversial, but – there is always a but on social media – “you did overstep your bounds, ” she said, when I took the “For Sale By Owner” signs down at the Round House Cafe last week.

I sometimes think there are really two kinds of readers in the blogosphere, people who respect the opinions and choices of others, and people who respect only their own choices, and dismiss the choices of others. This is, of course, the cancer afflicting our political system at the moment, half of us hating and fearing the choices of the other half and insisting that only we have the wisdom and decency to make the right ones.

They denigrate us, we denigrate them. We all see demons behind every thought. We look at the thoughts and actions of others, and see them only through one narrow prism: what would I do, what do I believe?

Nancy has every right to her opinion, of course, and i invite differing comments on my pages, so long as they are civil, and Nancy certainly was. She was also quite certain that she knew what I should do and not do.

So here, Nancy and I go our different ways. She did not persuade me, I did not persuade her.

When you create sparks, knowingly or not, you accept the fact –  especially in our world – that some people will praise you for them, others will tell you flatly and without any hesitation that you are wrong. Speaking only for myself, I do not have the moral certainty or confidence to tell Nancy what she should and should not do in her life.

I don’t know her, or what she thinks, or what she sees and hears, or how she lives, or what factors shaped her views, or what she wants to do with her life. How can I possibly know what decisions she ought to make with her life? This is the God thing for me, it is what God is supposed to do, and I am the farthest thing from a God that there is.

How can Nancy know the boundaries of my own life and morality – what is stepping too far, what is not stepping far enough? For Barbara, I have created a spark that has perhaps inspired her to be moral in a way that seems right to her.  She believes, as I do, that the issues involving the “For Sale” signs transcend real estate and conventional responses to choices.

To Nancy, there is only one issue – it is wrong to touch anyone else’s property, and that is clear to her, that is the end of it. This is one of the things I love about living in the country, this idea that our own space and property are sacrosanct. To me, that is the essence of tolerance. I see that I have threatened her sense of order and propriety in the world.  She is not moved by the spark I tried to create. You cannot, of course, write for other people, only for yourself.

To me, the signs evoke many issues beyond property, and Nancy named them, the need to support community, the earth in particular.

The great moral philosophers – Kant, Locke, Arendt, Socrates (I am a humble and life-long student of moral philosophy, perhaps because I saw and hear little about it when I grew up) all agreed that moral conduct seems to depend primarily on the dialogue of human beings with themselves, not on the values and opinions of others.

We must never place ourselves in a position where we might have to despise ourselves. Morally speaking, this should be enough not only to enable us to tell right from wrong, but also to do right and avoid wrong.

It is not a matter of concern with the other but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity and even human pride. The moral standard is neither the love or approval of some neighbor or stranger nor of self-love, but self-respect.

In our culture, we seem to treat everyone with an idea like a political candidate running for office. We feel we have to vote and agree or disagree. We rarely listen or consider. We are almost never alone with ourselves to think.

I find the best choices I have ever made were made alone. Thoreau wrote that to be in company,  even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. “I love to be alone,” he write, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Social media, of course, is the very antithesis of being alone, and I see the irony of it. Because of social media, Barbara can support my work and encourage my ideals. Because of social media, Nancy can immediately dismiss them. This is the challenge of our time for anyone who, like Thoreau, or me, seeks to create sparks.  You need space to think. But you can not ever be alone with a thought, not for one second, and surely not in front of millions of strangers. Every idea is open instantly to the world, and for the world – strangers mostly – to judge and weight.

Before a thought is born, there are long lines of people telling it what it should be, if anything at all. Thoreau would not have cared for Facebook, he would have thrown himself into the pond.

Is is more pleasing to get a message like Barbara’s than one like Nancy’s, but I think Barbara will understand when I say that neither one shapes the decisions I make. Morality is a personal and individual thing, it is something precious inside of me, and I do not much care what other people might do or might think I should do. No one, really, can say what I ought to do but me.

Barbara spoke to my purpose when she wrote that I am creating sparks, not so much in the hope of influencing others, but of influencing me,  for the purpose of creating what appears good to me.

If I light that spark, I will have amounted to something as a writer. I seek the freedom and wildness to make my own sparks, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign myself to the mysterious and unexplorable.