I started and persist for two reasons: to build more of an audience for my books, workshops, and other freelancing curves of work, and even more so, for my soul. Writing has always been a hybrid spiritual-emotional-artistic practice for me, helping me clear away the cobwebs on the ceilings and dust bunnies on the floors of whatever I think I’m doing, and land more in the actual time and place I am. I began writing as a teenager to cope with some traumatic times that overwhelmed me everywhere but on the page, and I continue writing decades later because of how stringing word to word connects me with something larger than my little thoughts or big anxieties.
Sometimes writing this blog is a way to share curiosities and wonders, such as the 100,000 snow geese on an oxbow of the Missouri river. Sometimes it’s to pay tribute to people and places beating in my heart. Sometimes I’m tilting toward the light of how people show us the way through injustices or heartbreaks. But always I’m writing as an act of discovering, for myself most of all, what’s what, where, how, and why; I have doubt writing is a way of both knowing what we know in our bones, and unknowing what we thought we knew but turns out to be old scaffolding. Writing is an amazing road — in many ways like most other arts — into accessing much more of our intelligence and perceptions than our habitual thinking. In my case, I’m often much smarter and clearer on the page, and I can speak more with language from body and soul on occasion.
So when I look out the window and glimpse beauty, change, birds in flights or winter roosting in all the corners of the field, my first impulse is often to start writing something to tell you about it and to help me see this tiny fraction of reality really happening in real time. Thanks for joining me on the page or screen.
****Related to this post, I’m teaching two sessions of the workshop “Blogging for Your Soul and Audience” — one inperson 4-5:30 p.m., Sat., January 20 at Ellen Plumb Bookstore in Emporia, Kansas, and another online (via your own computer or phone) 4-5:30 p.m., Sun., January 28. The cost for either is simply buying my book based on this blog, Everyday Magic: Fieldnotes on the Mundane & Miraculous. More at my events page (Note: for Emporia workshop you buy the book at Ellen Plumb Boostore).
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