Blogging is a funny thing.  You never know which post is going to take off and which is going to sit there.  Sometimes a post comes back from the dead.

Last spring I published this post merging a trope from The Walking Dead with spiritual practice.  It was meant to sum up a series I was doing on science and religion.  The other posts were popular, and I had this cute little thing where I tied one of TV’s most popular shows into my final thoughts on the matter, so I figured that post would get some views.

Nope.  Nobody saw it.  The post died pretty miserably.  But apparently no one stabbed it in the head, because last month it came back to life.

I assume it was because The Walking Dead’s new season began last month, but one way or the other people were suddenly finding their way to that old post in droves.  They were flocking to it.  The other pieces I wrote had their time and eventually faded. Pretty typical.  Not this one.  It’s still pulling its strange Energizer Bunny routine. The article got eight times as many views just yesterday than it got between April and September.

There’s a witchy lesson in here.  Your words are forever.  Whether you post them online or just say something offhanded to a friend, the things you say leave an impression that you may never fully understand.  The sword can help save the village from danger or it can be used to kill innocent people.  Words can hurt or heal, and you’d better choose wisely because you can’t take it back.

We have so many ways to communicate in our world.  Between our prodigious collection of social media accounts, our thumbs constantly pounding out texts and Emails, our interactions at work and home, and the interactive nature of modern news reporting, it seems we are always in communication with someone or something.  We are constantly delivering words to other people and into the universe.  Each one remains out there, somewhere.  It makes an impression on someone, and that person connects that impression - for good or ill - to you.  There is no sanctuary.

We’ve all said things that hurt others.  We’ve all contributed to the negative nastiness in social media.  It’s important to be conscious of it in order to improve ourselves in the future. So to echo that zombie post (and you’ll only really get this if you read that post):

How do your words help heal people and the world?  

How do they damage people and the world?  

Why?