I go back and forth on whether to keep this blog going, or give it a final bow. For twelve years I have been faithful to it, offering a daily quote during my cottage days, and after that, a quote every other day. That routine I love and want to keep up. So, for this moment at least, I shall do so. My longing and commitment to silence, solitude, and simplicity remains strong, and feels pretty much hardwired. To continue to write about it calls for some kind of shift, but I don’t know what that might be. So, in keeping with what I have always done, I share my thinking with you.
There is no external need to keep posting. I’m not trying to make money or even gather a following. Neither of those have ever been my goal. So, I tell myself, post whenever you want and leave it at that. And yet, to my few followers who do check in to see how things are going with me, I feel an obligation to keep a presence.
This is how I see it. Blogs are not personal journals. Rather they are a public offerings of what is personally important that the blogger wants to share. Why share? I’ve always liked sharing what I have done and what is important in my life, and I’ve always appreciated learning about the life experience of others. The books that I wrote for teachers, in which I described what I did in my classroom and why I did it, are examples of this. In Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred Year Old Mother and Me, I told about how my mother and I experienced the last two years of her life together.
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Writing all of that has helped. Writing always does. Now that I think about it, my blogs are really a cleaned up version of a personal journal. Truth be told, I blog more for ME than for you. It’s all about me, so the expression goes, and shamefully I admit that to be true. But in blogging about me, I hope you can absorb what I share into it’s all about you, so that in blogging about me and you, we both can admit that it’s all about love. I gotta keep at it.
There is no external need to keep posting. I’m not trying to make money or even gather a following. Neither of those have ever been my goal. So, I tell myself, post whenever you want and leave it at that. And yet, to my few followers who do check in to see how things are going with me, I feel an obligation to keep a presence.
This is how I see it. Blogs are not personal journals. Rather they are a public offerings of what is personally important that the blogger wants to share. Why share? I’ve always liked sharing what I have done and what is important in my life, and I’ve always appreciated learning about the life experience of others. The books that I wrote for teachers, in which I described what I did in my classroom and why I did it, are examples of this. In Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred Year Old Mother and Me, I told about how my mother and I experienced the last two years of her life together.
*****
Writing all of that has helped. Writing always does. Now that I think about it, my blogs are really a cleaned up version of a personal journal. Truth be told, I blog more for ME than for you. It’s all about me, so the expression goes, and shamefully I admit that to be true. But in blogging about me, I hope you can absorb what I share into it’s all about you, so that in blogging about me and you, we both can admit that it’s all about love. I gotta keep at it.
