Thanks so very much for tuning into this newest iteration of my blog. Some of you read actively when I was blogging a couple of years ago. If you are one of those, you know that my blogging life was hijacked by Facebook – the status updates and the easy and frequent commenting that went a long with them was (and still is!) exciting and fun in a similar but very different way.
But my oh my, I have missed writing. And I really want to do more of that and get better at it. And I want to write about more than just my life, because I feel like I am pretty good at the journaling thing, but not great at the “real writing” thing. About a year ago I took a class with an online group taught by Bindu Wiles called “The Diamond Cutters.” With a group of five other women (from Australia, Canada, California, Minnesota and New York, whew!), we worked on memoir and also crashed back into some of the technical aspects of writing, which I had barely thought about since college. That was a very invigorating and exciting time for me and excavated some long lost dreams about writing and sharing my writing.
Because I write in my journal nearly every day, and also write letters and a lot of email, it's hard for me to get out of my own voice in writing. But I think to stretch myself, I'd like to write a little fiction down the road. So, somehow this concept of the “Sunday Blog” has evolved as a milestone towards this larger goal. I imagine the blog to be a little me, a little Sunday op-ed, a little Sunday sermon.
To help with some discipline and structure, I am committing to a “pilot season” of twelve Sundays that roughly match up with my kids' school calendar. I am also going to try and dedicate daily time to the “column” during homework time each weeknight. Hopefully this will help build and solidify the “homework routine” with the kids. In church world, church-goers often go to a Sunday service and then Wednesday night is sometimes a night where there is church activity – choir, groups, bible studies, etc. So occasionally I may use a Wednesday entry to blog about the blog – because I can tell already, I'm going to need to do that.
For the last year or more, I've been pretty faithfully following about 10 – 15 blogs, most of them written by friends I knew or know now, but some are the biggies whom I've never met. I love the different styles, and the different “hooks” that bloggers use. They are also pretty personal – not private, but personal. Bloggers often get a lot of guff for “putting it all out there” and sharing so much personal information with so many people. But I know I am grateful. I love catching up on people's lives late at night or over lunch when the world stops spinning and I actually have some time to focus. I believe there is community in blogging and yes – even in Facebook (horror!).
Two summers ago, my two sisters and my mom and I saw the movie, “Julie and Julia,” which (juxtaposes) the life of Julie Powell and Julia Childs. Julie Powell is a 29 year old blogging her way through a year of cooking every recipe in Julia Childs' most famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol 1. To unfairly encapsulsate the message of the movie: Julie Powell blogged to find herself; learned from reading Julia Childs' cookbook how to live fearlessly with joy and confidence.
We all enjoyed the movie and my sister JoJo who has always read my blog said, “why don't you blog anymore? This summer, I picked up the book version of the movie which I have just finished. There is a part of the book where Julie writes about her experience of the 2002 blackout in New York. By this time she was more than halfway through the cookbook, and had a small but faithful following of readers on her blog, most of whom wrote in to check on her and see how she survived the blackout. She writes the following:
“It is a comfort to have friends, maybe especially friends you will never meet...Because people who would have looked at this as a disaster happening to other people were suddenly looking at it as a disaster happening to one of their own, to a friend. I don't mean this to be arrogance; in fact, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with me one way or the other. I think what it means is, people want to care about people. People look after one another, given the chance...I figure, maybe just believing in goodness generates a tiny bit of the stuff, so that by being so foolish as to believe in our better natures, if just for a day, we actually contribute to the sum total of generosity in the universe.”
“People want to care about people. People look after one another, given the chance.” That to me, is the beauty of blogging. It is interesting how finding time in life to care for anyone outside of my family and closest friends is a really tough challenge for me these days – but it is what it is and I have beaten myself up silly trying to not feel pulled like Elastagirl. I am grateful that through reading blogs and blogging myself, perhaps somehow I can look after and be looked after.
Thanks so much for tuning into my pilot season.
