April 2016

Reading your thoughtful, sincere replies to my questions last week has been so helpful to me as they’ve appeared one after another in my inbox and gathered here…helpful to others, as well, I know. When I last wrote, I wasn’t sure what I would be writing today, a week later. I hadn’t really considered giving up on blogging, but I was unsure about so much.

Between our conversation here, all I am learning from a survey I created for my Wisteria & Sunshine women, and the conversations at Sarah’s blog and at Susannah Conway’s …I am feeling renewed and hopeful.

Tho’ what really spilled me over into that place with some passion was the conversation on the radio that I’ve had on quietly in the background while I chose photos, cut out slips of paper and wrote your names upon them. It was a show on On Point about the verbal abuse many women online suffer, mostly through the conduit of Twitter, but in other ways, as well. And it made me grateful all over again for the wells of beauty and kindness, wisdom and feeling, that we women create who wander in a particular corner of these internet lands.

I feel more committed than ever to continuing on from my humble (but still so much the same) beginnings. These places apart from Instagram, FB, monetization and celebrity are important to keep alive. Our own patches to plant in our own ways.

When I reread my very first blog post, I remembered what it felt like to begin…entirely hopeful and exciting, with only the considerations of what it would mean to my family/work balance to weigh. Much has changed in ten years, and any online adventure is now barnacled with many negatives in addition to the positives. But you know, I feel it is the same with so much of life as I age and as our society gets more complicated.

So the answer seems to be the one I always come to when my home, my work, my health, or my days become cluttered and dingy…it is time to sort and let go, refine and refresh…find the ways to make whatever it is feel peaceful and inviting again. Some of the answers for blogging I am finding in your comments and in the quiet moments I try to leave open for the answers to come to my heart. I know that you can find your own answers in the same ways, and I hope that you do. The world needs us, if we can share in ways that feel nourishing and worthwhile.

I am learning through these posts and surveys and such, that when I am brave enough to ask for responses, I receive them….and that they will be enough to go on for a long while. My relationship to comments is shifting, I think, in a healthy way. I am going to trust more that you are out there listening and finding my words and photos of use and pleasure. Please use the little heart button when you have nothing to say in return (it really counts to me!)…leave a comment when you are moved to and it works for you…know that I always feel like I am finding a gift in that post-office-in-the-hedge when a comment appears, but they are not required…and that I, too, often find it hard to keep up and will usually only respond in my next post, or when a question is asked.

We must each find our own way, and it truly is more work than it used to be. But it is work I am called to, I suppose. So as I step into this eleventh year of blogging today, I do so with a happy heart and blowing a kiss to each of you.

xo

Laurie

…will be receiving the notes and collage kit…

It is Friday.

I am here.

But I feel as tho’ I could write this post all over again…mostly all over, substituting the worry for…uncertainty, I suppose. Definitely still beside the  “little,wild pool, on the moss-soft bank, making circles on the water’s surface and trying to see into its depths.”

I’d love to talk about blogging, specifically this time, if you are interested?

You see, next Friday will be my tenth blogging anniversary. That feels good and important. Yet…I continue to struggle with what to share here…and the blogs I read have lately gone the way of my unopened magazines…and the sifting of all one can do and be online goes on…

In recent months here, the spam comments I receive far outweigh the welcome and true ones…but it isn’t all about comments, is it? I understand all of the reasons for not commenting, as I don’t do very much of it myself. Yet the lack of them does start the pondering again. Everyone has their reasons for blogging, and I have an inkling that if you are sure of your reasons and they are being satisfied…the world’s response is not so weighty and spam and technical tangles not so bothersome.

But it is all wondering to me at the moment, as the swirl of blogging, numbers, hashtags and the like are tossed up in my basket and I carry on with my winnowing.

There is one spare Moon Collage Kit left in my studio, and a last package of Gratitude Notes (sorting and sifting in my studio, as well) that I would love to send to one of you in honor of my blogging anniversary next week…picked from amongst the replies to these questions. Do generalize and expand upon them,  for they are meant only as a beginning for our conversation…

-Do you visit blogs as often as you used to and does it feel mostly the same or different?

-Has your commenting changed over the years if you do comment?

-Are there other ways your blog-visiting has changed over the years?

-If you have your own blog, how has it changed for you and how do you feel about it?

-Do you feel hopeful about the future of blogging?