The real work

Today Beth of The Cassandra Pages celebrates her 10 year blog-birthday, and the entry she posted to commemorate the occasion raises for me the usual questions about what my “real work” is. Is it writing blog posts? Writing books? Teaching? Taking care of pets? When it’s all done and I’m dead, will it make any difference that I blogged, or that I did anything at all? What does it mean, after all, to make a difference in a world that keeps spinning—change and impermanence reigning supreme—whether I do anything or not?

What, in other words, is any writer’s “real” work? Annie Dillard, whom I’d like to emulate as much as anyone, said at the beginning of Teaching a Stone to Talk that her short nonfiction essays weren’t written to supplement her “real” work; instead, her short essays are her real work. Another of my literary heroes, Henry David Thoreau, wrote essays, poetry, several book-length works of nonfiction, and a multi-volume journal he spent his entire adult life adding to, page by page. So what was Thoreau’s “real” work? The books published during his lifetime? The books published after his death? The journal he spent his entire creative life adding to, and which served as the source of his published essays and book-length nonfiction?

Blogging is an ephemeral genre: what I wrote last week doesn’t matter much tomorrow. But if you look at a blog as being an ongoing project, then the dedication it takes to keep a blog going long-term has to count for something. As Beth herself writes,

…what emerges is a body of work. It isn’t conventional, or even graspable, and perhaps will be impermanent, but I know that it is, in fact, THE body of artistic work accomplished in my lifetime which most closely represents me. It’s also taught me the most. Once upon a time I wasn’t satisfied with that. Now, I am.

Ten years is a long time to do anything faithfully, much less thoughtfully and with care. It took me ten years to get my PhD, and between you and me, those letters after my name haven’t meant much in terms of professional prestige: I make no more money and have no more job security as “Dr.” than I did as “Ms.” So is my dissertation—a book-length work that was the culmination of ten years of scholarly work and now sits in the archives of my alma mater—somehow count for more than Beth’s ten-year body of blog-work just because my dissertation was “published” and earned me some letters after my name?

Both Beth’s blog and my dissertation reflect ten years of work, but one has been reaching out to readers and encouraging them on an almost-daily basis to think, write, read, draw, paint, take photos, sing, make books, speak out, and otherwise be active and engaged, whereas the other is considered a scholarly work and collects dust. So what is the “worth” of an active mind engaged in creative pursuits? What is the “worth” of ten years of showing up, paying attention, and sharing what you see?

If you’re a writer of nonfiction prose, it’s easy to fall into the trap of categorizing your work on the basis of its length: sustained, book-length narratives are “real work,” and short, self-contained essays are something else. If you’re a writer of nonfiction prose who also keeps a blog, it’s even easier to get confused by these categories: short, self-contained essays that are published in print count as “real work,” but blog-entries (no matter how carefully crafted) do not.

I would love to write a book, as Beth has: I have always wanted to write a book. At the moment, I have the vague, sketchy outline of book-length narrative in my head, but whenever I turn to work on it, my ideas turn tail and flee. Given my desire to write this book, should I force myself to work on it exclusively, even when it doesn’t “want” to be worked on, or should I follow my muse wherever it appears, even if that means working on the book while also writing “mere” blog-essays that may or may not ever “lead somewhere”?

That is the sticking point, isn’t it: this idea that what we do should “lead somewhere”? The other night I had dinner with Seon Joon, whose blog is younger than Beth’s, but just as deep. Seon Joon asked me, point blank, whether I was working on a book, remembering (I’m sure) that I’d mentioned one, vaguely, the last time we’d talked. My response to her was yes, I’m working on a book…but no, I don’t know whether that work is leading somewhere, or whether the product of that work will ever be finished, much less published. But in the meantime, I know I’m enjoying the process of working on a book, keeping a blog, and basically being creative in one way or another every single day.

Regardless of where the road leads, in other words, I’m happy being on that road. Did Thoreau know when he started his journal that it would eventually fill some seven thousand pages and be published as a work in its own right? Or did Thoreau keep a journal simply because keeping a journal felt right as he was doing it?

I for one am glad that Beth has been blogging faithfully and thoughtfully these past ten years. She is one of the writers who inspired me to start a blog of my own, and the fact that she is still posting is immensely inspiring. Maybe the real work isn’t a noun—a product you finish and publish—but a verb: a thing you do and keep doing. If that be the case, then here’s hoping Beth keeps up the real work for a very long time.

 

Nine years and a week later

I started blogging at Hoarded Ordinaries on December 27, 2003, which means my ninth blog-birthday was last Thursday. Last Thursday was also the day I finally submitted the last of my fall semester grades, so I’m finally finding time to follow my tradition of looking back on the past year in blog-posts.

The long and short of it

I started 2012 by participating in last year’s “Mindful Writing Challenge,” posting a small stone and an accompanying (typically unrelated) photo almost every day in January. I’m participating again in this year’s Challenge, although I’m posting my daily observations on Twitter, not here.

One of the questions I continue to grapple with is how much and where I should share what I write. Last spring in a post titled “Twitterpated,” I explained how I was trying to use Twitter as a showcase for shorter, more focused observations…and then I got waylaid by other things. This year, I’m hoping to post to Twitter more frequently, saving this blog for longer, more detailed essays…but only time will tell whether I keep to that intention.

Coming and going

Just as I’ll always remember 2004 as being the year when I both finished my doctorate and divorced, I’ll always remember 2012 as being the year we put Reggie to sleep and I left my job at Keene State College. Just as finishing my doctorate didn’t cause my divorce, putting Reggie to sleep didn’t cause me to quit Keene State…but in both cases, the chance juxtaposition of two significant transitions means I’ll always associate them with one another.

“Two-faced” is the post where I first mentioned the ruthless budget cuts that led to my downsizing at Keene State, and “Letting go” is the post where I officially announced I’d quit my job there. I memorialized Reggie in a post titled “A good boy,” written a few days after we’d put him to sleep, and I wrote about the grieving process in “Go gentle.” I also wrote about impermanence and grief in “Sudden hummingbirds,” which made specific mention of Reggie, and “A stone that will endure,” which focused instead of Sylvia Fish, a goldfish I never met but whose grave marker now sits in our dining room: a monument to someone else’s beloved pet.

In keeping with the theme of impermanence, in “Anticlimax” I described the extermination of a bald-faced hornets nest I’d described in “Good neighbors,” “After the storm,” “Homecoming,” and “The last day of our acquaintance.” In “Fallen timbers,” I contemplate the changed landscape of Mount Auburn Cemetery in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which blew through but largely spared us here in New England.

Teaching and learning

Although I quit my job at Keene State last year, I haven’t quit teaching, and I still find that my job is an abundant source of blog-fodder. In “How to fall,” for instance, I look back on my final spring semester at Keene State, and in “What makes a poem?,” I share an activity I did with students in a summer school lit class.

In “(Almost) back to school,” I describe the newbie jitters I felt before starting the semester as a Visiting Lecturer at Framingham State University, a job which in turn inspired the post “How to read a true war story.” My college teaching was also the inspiration for the posts “Office in a bag” and “Theme for English B.” Starting a new job on a new campus gave me an excuse to explore new places, which I describe in “The way of water” and “Let your fingers do the walking.”

Adventures near and far

This past spring, J and I went visited the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College, enjoying the greenery and witnessing the once-in-a-decade blooming of an otherwise unremarkable shingle plant. In April, we watched the Boston Marathon, which once again brought me to tears, and we met up with old friends to watch Teju Cole accept a prestigious award at the JFK Library. I also visited (and duly blogged) labyrinths in Keene and Chestnut Hill, proving again that walking meditation is good for the soul.

This past summer, J and I admired, photographed, but did not bet on the racehorses at Suffolk Downs, and we attended Saint Joseph’s Feast in Boston’s North End, which brought to mind thoughts of James Joyce. We also went to a few Red Sox games, which I blogged here and here, and we traveled to visit family in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which resulted in a lot of photos from Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh and the Columbus Zoo in Columbus.

Closer to home, a friend and I went to the Josiah McElheny exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and we battled the crowds flocking to see the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. In November, I took a solitary pilgrimage to Thoreau’s grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, and I also checked out Houghton Gardens, which I’ve frequently seen from the T but had never before visited on foot.

Lastly, in September, I finally got around to blogging a pilgrimage to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City that J and I had taken in December, 2011: better late than never.

The practice of writing

Keeping a blog for nine years provides its own assortment of lessons, and the writing I post on Hoarded Ordinaries is only one kind of writing I regularly do. In addition to blogging, I also keep a handwritten journal, and in October I started devoting a more intentional amount of time (namely, an hour a day five days a week) to writing words that sometimes end up on-blog and sometimes get filed as “Other,” a process I described in “The hours.” In addition to all this daily (or at least “almost daily”) writing, in 2012 I also participated in two informal day-long writing retreats: one at MIT in August, and the other at Framingham State in November.

This practice of writing an hour a day five days a week led to many of the longer essays I posted in October and November, including “Showing up at the page” and “I no longer believe this.” In December, I had less time to write, but I did take a moment in “Sharing silence” to reflect on the Newtown shootings and to admit the word-weariness I sometimes feel as a writer and teacher of writing.

What do I expect from 2013, my tenth year of blogging? I have no idea, butO I hope to continue showing up and seeing what words decide to appear.

If you want to review previous blogiversary posts, you can find all of them (minus 2010, when I never got around to posting a retrospective) here (2011), here (2009), here (2008), here (2007), here (2006), here (2005), and here (2004). Enjoy!

 

Eight years and several days later

One of the cool things about starting a blog a few days after Christmas is you get to do your annual blogiversary post around the time that everyone else is doing their year-end retrospectives. I started blogging at Hoarded Ordinaries on December 27, 2003, which means my blog-birthday was last Tuesday. Following the tradition of past years, here is a look back on the past year in blog-posts, now that Hoarded Ordinaries is eight years and several days old.

Just keep doing it

When I first started blogging, I tried to post every day; more recently, though, my posting has been less frequent. Now that I post photos to Flickr and quick jots and tittles to Facebook and Twitter, I typically save my blog for more substantial pieces, which means I tend to post about once or twice a week. There have been two exceptions to that in 2011, however. Last January, I participated in the “River of Stones” daily posting practice and thus shared a photo and short observation every day, a practice I plan to continue this January. And this past November, I participated in National Blog Posting Month by posting at least a photo every day.

Momentous milestones

This past year marked the end of an era as Osama bin Laden was killed, an event I reflected upon in a post titled “At last.” This past year also marked a significant milestone on the ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which I remembered in a May post titled “Memorial” and a September post titled “Sunday on the Charles.” On a more personal level, this past May I moved out of my apartment in Keene, an experience I chronicled in “Moving On” and “Unbound.”

How fragile we are

The theme of mortality is a continual undercurrent here at Hoarded Ordinaries; as a Buddhist, I’m perpetually mindful of impermanence and the fleeting nature of the present moment. This realization of the precious fragility of sentient life is illustrated in “There will come soft rains,” which I wrote in response to the spring earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan, and this same theme echoes throughout “When you live with an old dog,” which chronicles Reggie’s recent decline into old age. In September, a storm that knocked down countless limbs in our neighborhood inspired me to reflect on mortality in “Left hanging,” and earlier this month, a bit of graffiti reminding us that we’re “still gonna die” gave me a bit of “Perspective.”

Art and Writing

I started Hoarded Ordinaries because I wanted a forum to showcase my writing; very quickly, however, this blog became a place where I marry word and image. Because of that ongoing focus, it should come as no surprise that I wrote about both art and writing in 2011. This past summer, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts featured an exhibit of works by Dale Chihuly, which I blogged in both “Enormous” and “A thousand flowers.” (I never did get around to finishing a promised follow-up post about Chihuly’s “Ikebana Boat,” however.) In “Two views,” I blogged about an afternoon spent sketching with a friend; in “Returning,” I talked about the courage it takes to revise a piece of writing; and in “Completion,” I recounted the lessons I learned from writing 50,000 words of nonfiction during November’s National Novel Writing Month.

Traveling a great deal in Boston

Although J and I traveled to Los Angeles and Seattle in August, I didn’t blog our vacation. Instead, I wrote various posts inspired by day-trips J and made in and around Boston. In “Run like the wind,” we watched the Boston Marathon from a vantage point within walking distance from our house. In “Time upon time,” we visited an archeology exhibit at Boston College, and in “Between the lions,” we visited a Civil War exhibit at the main branch of the Boston Public Library. Finally, in “One picture” I shared (yes) one image from a walk in South Boston.

Inspiring reads

As a college writing and literature instructor, I spend a lot of time reading student papers, so any time I’m able to devote to pleasure reading is precious. Although I didn’t blog any full-length book reviews in 2011, I did write several posts that were inspired by books I was reading at the time. “Remembered landscapes,” for instance, is a meditation on walking and place inspired in part by Teju Cole’s Open City. “In sickness and in health” was my response to Diane Ackerman’s recent book about her husband’s recovery from a stroke, One Hundred Names for Love, and my Christmas Eve post, “Christmas Finches,” was inspired in part by an earlier Ackerman book, A Slender Thread, which describes her experience working for a suicide prevention hotline.

So that is the year that was here at Hoarded Ordinaries; who knows what the next year will bring, blog- or otherwise. Here’s hoping 2012 will be happy, healthy, and hopeful for us all.

The photos illustrating today’s belated blogiversary post feature the mannequins from the Great Eastern Trading Company in Central Square, Cambridge, both past and present.

 

Out of reach

Today I received an invitation to join Google+, a social networking site I’d heard various folks mention on Facebook recently. I’m not normally an early adopter of online (or any) technologies: a creature of habit, I typically prefer my old, familiar ways to something strange and newfangled. But since the friend who invited me is someone I know both online and face-to-face–and since this same friend is a “cool kid” who keeps up-to-date with the latest ways of interacting online–I accepted her invitation to join Facebook’s newest competition.

As soon as I connected my Google profile to Google+, however, I had a pang of joiners’ remorse. Already, I feel spread too thin among the various “places” where I maintain an online presence. At any given moment, I share stuff on my blog, on Flickr, on Facebook, and on Twitter. How many more places can I possibly find cool news to post and share, and how many more places do I need to check to see what my cool friends are doing?

Way back in the old days, keeping a blog was all you needed to do to keep in touch with friends both near and far. In the days after my divorce, for instance, one friend used to check my blog every few days just to make sure I was still alive and posting, like keeping an eye on the house of an elderly neighbor for signs of life. Nowadays, though, my blogging friends and I can (and do) go days or even weeks without publishing a proper blog-post, leaving our online footprints on Facebook or Twitter instead.

On any given day, if I want to know how Friend X is doing, checking her or his blog isn’t enough; I also need to check for recent Facebook updates, Flickr photos, or Tweets. Now that Google+ offers another “room” where cool kids can congregate, it might be easier just to call and talk to Friend X to see how she or he is really doing rather than clicking a half different places where such information might be posted.

In this era of smart phones, texting, and Twitter, I feel like a dinosaur when I admit that sometimes I don’t want to “be in touch.” When I was in grad school, for instance, I’d sometimes do research at the public library, figuring no one would think to look for me there rather than the library on campus. The simple fact of leaving campus created the illusion of being out of reach, and I always got more done without the imagined threat of running into my students, colleagues, or friends.

Last month when J and I went to Pittsburgh then Columbus to visit family, I didn’t announce our whereabouts on-blog, on Facebook, or elsewhere: we just went offline like any normal person might have done in the old days, letting our families know when we were arriving while keeping in touch via email with work and school. After we’d arrived in Columbus, however, I realized a high school friend with whom we’d made last-minute dinner plans had mentioned these plans on Facebook, spurring an innocuous but sad-sounding message from another friend whom I hadn’t notified of our trip: “You were in town?” In the age of Facebook and Twitter, simply visiting your family and making Saturday night dinner plans without notifying your entire network of friends can be perceived as a social snub. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, what will happen to the concept of a secret getaway?

My neophyte understanding of Google+ suggests it’s set up so you can sort your contacts into various circles of intimacy, sharing one set of updates with “Friends” and another version of your life with “Family.” This way, if you want to complain about your relatives, in-laws, or coworkers behind their backs, you can conveniently post those gripes in a space where said folks won’t (presumably) see them.

But having blogged under my real name for so long, my posts available for anyone and everyone to see, I’ve learned how to keep to myself any tidbits I don’t want any given relative, in-law, coworker, or friend to see. Instead of relying upon social network circles or online privacy settings to keep my venting rants hidden from those they might hurt, I try to keep most of my obnoxious opinions to myself.

When I was a kid, one oft-repeated saying advised “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” As cheesy and Pollyanna-like this advice might sound, it’s served as a decent blog philosophy all these years. Instead of rushing to Facebook or Twitter to vent my latest gripe or defend my side in a petty squabble, I keep those opinions to myself, allowing a cooler head to prevail.

To some, this philosophy is tantamount to self-censorship; to me, it’s the making of good writing. Instead of broadcasting a first-draft version of the latest round of “here’s why I’m right,” I’m forced to digest said debate, figuring out a way to write about the issue at hand while preserving the privacy of all involved. This takes a good deal more crafting–and thus is far more artful–than the prevailing philosophy of “If you can’t say something nice, make sure you post your thoughts where only your closest, most like-minded contacts can read them.”

In my online World Literature class, we read a Rumi quatrain which nicely sums up my concerns about the dangers of over-sharing in our Instant-Information Age.

What I most want
is to spring out of this personality,
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.

Now that all the cool kids are connecting on Google+, where can an old dinosaur go to find a spot of solitude where she can keep her opinions to herself? Now that all the cool kids are connecting online, can we innovate an even more exotic concept: Google Unplugged?

Click here for more photos of Jonathan Borofsky’s “Walking to the Sky,” which I photographed when J and I were in Pittsburgh last month. If Borofsky’s figures look familiar, it might be because I’ve blogged his work before.

 

Which comes first

It’s a question I’ve been repeatedly asked by both my blogging and non-blogging friends. When you write a post, which comes first: the pictures or the post?

The answer, of course, is “It depends.” In some cases, I have a specific topic or theme I want to write about–often, something on my mind that I’ve written about in my paper journal–so then I find pictures to accompany that theme. These pictures might go along with what I’m blogging, or they might simply be whatever pictures I have on hand. This latter scenario is why so many of my posts about Zen are illustrated with pictures of graffiti. Because I typically walk through Central Square before sitting at the Cambridge Zen Center, on any given day that I blog about Zen, I usually have lots of graffiti pictures close at hand.

In other cases, though, I have pictures of a particular event that I plan to blog, so I start with those pictures and basically write an essay “around” them. Some examples of this kind of post would be the entries I’ve written about the Boston Marathon or pretty much any of my sports posts. Given a bunch of photos from a hockey or basketball game, I try to think of something to say that would go along with the pictures. These posts feel more like news articles than journal entries: I’m basically reporting on something I did, and I’m illustrating with pictures of what I saw. These posts feel different (neither better nor worse–just different) from the more “personal,” journal-inspired entries.

And then there are days like today when I simply have a picture–in this case, a tiny bee pollinating a cluster of pink flowers, which I took in our backyard one morning this week–that I want to share because I like it. There’s no big story behind how I came to shoot a picture of a bee in the backyard, or how I shot any of today’s other photos on various dog-walks this week. I just had these pictures lying around, so after posting them on Flickr, I tried to think of a reason (excuse?) to use them on-blog.

The all-time classic unanswerable question is “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” For writers who both blog and take pictures, though, a close second in the unanswerable question department is “Which comes first, the pictures or the post?”

 

Thirty

Just like that, it’s the last day of November, and I’ve reached the end of another stint of National Blog Posting Month. Publishing thirty posts in thirty days seems easy enough when you start off, and it seems easy enough in retrospect…but there were days between then and now when “thirty in thirty” seemed an impossible goal.

There are a few things I learned about blogging this past month. First, it really does help to have extra photos stockpiled for future usage. When I shot a handful of window-shopping images last December, for instance, I had no idea I’d end up blogging them this November. Rather than limiting yourself to taking only those pictures you immediately plan on using, go ahead and take the first picture, then the second, then the third. The photos you don’t use today might come in handy on a rainy day.

Second, preparation for blogging really does start the night before. If you write a rough draft of a blog-post the night before you plan to post it, you can take your time composing and revising it in your head, even when you aren’t at your computer or online. Just thinking about posting is typically the first step toward actually doing it…and actually starting a draft makes finishing that draft much easier and more likely.

Third, it’s a good idea to have at least one emergency post on hand just in case you need to post something quickly or at the last minute. There were many days this month when I wasn’t sure whether I’d find the time and opportunity to post. Even if I had something I wanted to post on a given day, I can never guarantee that I’ll make it online in time to publish a post. People get sick, laptops malfunction, work intervenes, and Internet connections get interrupted. On any given day, you might have plenty of time to write a long, detailed post…or you might have just enough time to sigh, shake your head, and envy those with more reliable schedules.

Now that I’ve officially fulfilled my NaBloPoMo commitment, I’m looking forward to blogging a bit less frequently these days. December is an extremely busy month for college writing instructors, so I’m looking forward to having some extra time each day to read student papers or do other teaching tasks rather than figuring out what to “feed the blog.” November is one of the year’s shorter months, but you’d never know that from the level of anxiety and self-doubt successful bloggers feel when considering how their journal scribblings relate to real, sharable stuff. There have been days this past month when something as simple as counting to thirty seemed entirely impossible.

 

Starts the night before

When I was a fresh-faced and earnest young undergraduate, the pastor of the evangelical church I attended at the time said something that has stuck with me long after I drifted from his particular theology. In response to a group of bleary-eyed congregants sneaking in late to Sunday morning worship, Pastor R proclaimed from his pulpit, “Preparation for worship starts the night before.”

It was a lesson I didn’t initially appreciate. As a college student, I procrastinated as much as any other student, which often meant staying up late to finish work I should have done earlier. Although I wasn’t much of a party animal, there were plenty of Saturday nights when I stayed up late doing homework: going to lengthy church services on Sunday meant doing a double-dose of homework on Saturday night. Still, Pastor R’s advice made sense to me intellectually. If you want to be bright-eyed for Sunday morning worship, you shouldn’t stay up late on Saturday night. It’s a simple matter of cause and effect.

I no longer go to lengthy Sunday church services, but I’ve finally come to realize the wisdom of Pastor R’s advice. Preparation for teaching, I’ve learned, starts the night before. If I want a busy teaching day to start smoothly, it helps if I pack my lunch, arrange my books and papers, and choose my outfit the night before. When morning comes, there’s always so much to do and plan–so many morning woulds clamoring for attention–so it helps if the basics are already laid out and ready to go.

During this month of NaBloPoMo, I’m learning that preparation for daily blogging also starts the night before. Last year, I learned that producing a month’s worth of illustrated blog-posts is easier if you’re in the habit of stockpiling images to use on days when light and inspiration are sparse. This year, I’m taking my practice of planning ahead even one step further. In addition to shooting extra pictures to use on a proverbial rainy day, this year I’ve tried to write an initial draft of each day’s post the night before. Knowing that I have a literal head-start on each day’s blog-post makes it that much easier for me to finish and publish that post.

Instead of reverting to the procrastinating ways of my college days, it feels reassuring to know that on any given November morning, I have photos and at least a rough draft (rather than a completely blank screen) to start with. I may have drifted from Pastor R’s evangelical theology, but I’d like to think that my newly acquired habit of starting something important the night before would make him proud.

 

All NaBlos’ Eve

Today is Halloween and the last day of October, which means we’re on the brink of November’s National Blog Posting Month: that time of year when many bloggers make a public commitment to post something every day for the month of November. Once again this year, I’m planning to participate in NaBloPoMo, a commitment that can seem even scarier than the creepiest Halloween decor.

I participated in NaBloPoMo in 2008 and 2009, and in both cases I appreciated the discipline of making a conscious commitment to post something every day. Most months, I blog when I’m able, but once a year, it feels good to shift my blog-practice into overdrive. Making a commitment to post every day is an act of faith, a sign that you really do believe your mind is an abundant source of insight and inspiration even on days when you feel like you don’t have anything to say, much less time to say it. Making a commitment to post every day is a way of making a once-a-year declaration that writing isn’t something you do when you have enough time; it’s something you do every day, regardless.

November is a busy month for college professors–as I type these words, I have three stacks of student essay drafts to read and two online classes’ worth of end-term grading to tackle–so it’s a good time to make an arbitrary commitment to my own writing. November isn’t any more special than any other month, but NaBloPoMo forces me to act as if it were, finding something interesting to say and show even on days when the daily grind has me ground down. Here’s hoping I can keep blogging throughout the busy days of November without losing my head.

Click here for more information about National Blog Posting Month, a slightly more tame version of the National Novel Writing Month that sends so many writers to their keyboards in November.

 

Six years and two days later

My six-year blogiversary was this past Sunday: it’s been six years and two days since I posted my very first blog entry on December 27, 2003. This gives me an excuse to share my annual retrospective of the past year in blog-posts, loosely organized into categories.

Life as Lorianne

This past year was personally monumental in several senses. I turned 40 this past January, an occasion I commemorated in The Big 4-0. The year 2009 also marked the five year anniversary of my separation and divorce, a milestone I revisited in posts such as Retrospect and Bella Vita.

Although the daily format of blogging provides an excellent platform for keeping track of one’s mundane life, it also provides an excuse for looking back and taking stock of what one has learned over the years, something I did in posts such as Manjushri’s sword, Water under the bridge, and Checking in. There’s nothing like the death of a dear friend to make you take even deeper stock of your life, and I did so in No words and Wealth.

Not all the personal milestones in 2009 were so somber, though. In Recipe, for instance, I describe a wonderful meal a friend and I enjoyed on the occasion of her “forty-something” birthday.

Posts about Zen:

My meditation practice provides a perpetual source of blog fodder: if nothing else, sitting quietly and following your breath provides ample evidence of the boundless fecundity of your own thinking mind.

In Meditation, I struggled with the question of how to illustrate my Zen practice in response to a Photo Friday prompt; in A silent place, I tried to describe, as best I could, the indescribable “place” that meditation takes you after you’ve been practicing a while. In The wisdom of mist, I returned to this idea that meditation changes you over time by considering the way a fine but constant drizzle (like those we had through much of the month of June) soaks you just as surely as steady rain, and in I stand as nigh, I shared some insights inspired by a sidewalk inscription I observed one Sunday morning before arriving for mid-morning practice at the Cambridge Zen Center. And in The replacements, I contemplated the Zen truism that “impermanence surrounds us.”

Writing

Like my Zen practice, my daily practice of keeping a journal fuels my blogging. In Take note and Morning routine , I describe my daily ritual of writing in my Moleskine notebook, and in Riding the waves I describe how I’ve learned not to skip these pages on days that are busy. In Purely prosaic, I talk about how journal-keeping feeds my blogging, and in The bright side, I describe how daily blogging changes the way I look at my own life. Finally, in Just breathe I described the preparations I made before presenting several of my blog-essays at a public reading with a half-dozen of my Keene State teaching colleagues.

Birds and birding

I’ve been bird-watching since I was 12 years old, so it makes sense that I’d occasionally reference birds and birding on my blog. In Extreme closeup, for instance, I describe a wild duck chase involving a Eurasian teal at Newton’s Cold Spring Park, and in Saturday at the cemetery, I describe the hoopla caused by a pair of red-tailed hawks sunning themselves on the tower at Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In Fair and fowl, I once again go birdwatching in a cemetery: this time in Newton Cemetery on Thanksgiving Day.

In Heads up, I talk about the birds you can see even in the suburbs if you simply look up, and in Picture perfect, I narrate a trip with my family to Pickerington Ponds in central Ohio, a place I birded often when I was a teenager. In Flyby, J and I watch birds and planes at Belle Isle Marsh in East Boston, and in Of frost and pheasants, I’m startled to see a well-camouflaged pheasant on a morning dog-walk in Keene.

Sometimes birds are just birds, and sometimes birds represent something else. In Plenty, the endless flocks of migrating blackbirds I remember from my Ohio childhood serve as a metaphor for infinite creativity, and in Dreaming of Birds, the strange and exotic birds I occasionally see in my dreams are as elusive and unidentifiable as any mystery.

Sports

This year as in past years, J and I went to a lot of sporting events with cameras in hand, on a perpetual hunt for blog-worthy moments. In Freeze-frame, I explain my interest in hockey by describing my continued quest to photograph a puck in mid-drop. In Are you ready for some football and The beautiful game, I explain several of the reasons J and I have recently become soccer fans while Three tells why I’ve always loved basketball.

In The winners, J and I take a walk down the street to watch runners in the Boston Marathon, and in To the nines and Eyes, we travel all the way to Atlanta to see the Red Sox play the Braves.

Good walks remembered

They say that golf is a good walk ruined, but I’ve found that walking with an eye toward the bloggable actually enhances one’s perambulations, with some of the best pedestrian discoveries happening almost by accident.

In Unwind, September stride, and Leave your mind alone, for instance, I describe the dog-walks I rely upon to help me relax at the end of a long teaching day. In To make a prairie, Serendipitous, and Gossamer, I’m surprised to discover photogenic insects and arachnids, and in A place like this, The lesson of leaves, and Gone to seed, plants are the ones providing photogenic (and lesson-worthy) blog-fodder.

Art and culture

Art is a perennial source of inspiration in both my writing and blogging. In some cases, I use photographs of artwork to illustrate blog-posts about entirely different things, as is true with Dreamtime, which uses photos from Ugo Rondinone’s Clockwork for Oracles at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art to illustrate a post about the nightmares I often have before the start of a new semester. In other cases, though, I talk about art more explicitly.

In Metal, for instance, I use the occasion of a Photo Friday prompt to share photographs of my favorite installation at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In The sands of time, I consider a far more ephemeral medium–sand sculpture–as a metaphor for aging, and in Paper thick, the occasion of a New York City art show inspires a meditation on image and fashion. In Drawn from nature, my own nature journal sketches are the subject of scrutiny, and in Everyday use, an exhibit of art quilts leaves me wondering whether Art is the highest use an object can have.

Sounds good!

At the start of 2009, in a post titled Books for free, I talked about my lifelong fondness for public libraries and my more recent appreciation for digital audiobooks. Also in January, I committed to an audiobook challenge whereby I would blog reviews for 12 audiobooks before the end of the year.

The year ends on Thursday, and I’ve blogged only two audiobook reviews even though I have listened to the full dozen books I’d committed to. Perhaps sometime before New Year’s Day, I’ll take the time to tell you about the ten other books I listened to this year, but in the meantime, I’m proud of the two reviews I did post: Where the heart is, which focuses on Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and As she lay dying, which reviews Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.

And so another blog-year turns just in time for another New Year, and as always, who knows what blog-worthy moments 2010 will bring.

Faithful to the spirit of retrospection, today’s photos are recycled from the various blog-posts that made the year-end cut. If you want to review previous blogiversary posts, you can find them here (2008), here (2007), here (2006), here (2005), and here (2004). Enjoy!

 

The bright side

One of the things I like about this month’s commitment to post every day is the way it forces me to look on the literal bright side. When I announced that I’d be participating in this November’s National Blog Posting Month, I knew that finding something to say everyday wouldn’t be the problem, for words appear regardless of the weather. The challenge for daily posting in a darkening month is finding enough light to take pictures. On any given day, it’s not difficult to find something to tell you, but some day’s it’s a challenge to find something to show you.

In sunny months when I post every day or so, I usually rely on a daily intake of photos: whatever I blog today is illustrated with whatever I’ve just recently photographed. In November, however, there days like today when I literally don’t see much light of day. It was dark when I walked Reggie in the morning, it was dark when I got home to walk him again tonight, and I spent most of my in-between hours inside classrooms and my underground office, and neither of these places offers a great setting for digital photographs.

Point-and-shoot digital cameras need a lot of light to take decent pictures: that’s why most of the photos I post on-blog are taken outdoors. Outside on a sunny day, it’s difficult not to take good pictures, because the sunlight shows everything in its best light. But on dim days, even otherwise lovely things look drab and shabby. With less light to work with these days, scrounging a daily dose of bloggable pictures can be a challenge.

I’m learning this month to look at my sunny day dog-walks as my chance to stockpile photographic provisions for the rest of the week. Just as folks who go to the grocery store only once a week learn to make a list so they buy enough ingredients for an entire week’s worth of meals, I know that on my daylight dog-walks, I have to snap more than one day’s worth of bloggable pictures. I’m also learning that it’s good to have a well-stocked photographic larder in case of emergency. By posting all of my day-to-day pictures to Flickr–not just the ones I have immediate plans to blog–I know I have a pantry of non-perishables to fall back upon when my blog-cupboard is bare.

When you’ve made a commitment to post daily, you also approach each day with a different, more optimistic attitude. In addition to looking on the literal bright side, you also look on the proverbial one, viewing your day with an eye for the interesting, inspiring, or otherwise remarkable. On most days of a dimly lit, mid-semester month, there’s not much exciting happening in my life: prepping classes, walking the dog, doing chores, and reading piles upon piles of student papers isn’t exactly stuff to write home (or blog) about. But into each life a little sun must fall, and even the dullest days have their bright moments if you train yourself to spot them. A commitment to daily posting can provide that training if you make a concomitant commitment to keep your water-cooler whining to a minimum, deciding to post about the things you like about your life versus the usual complaints about the daily grind.

A Christian minister once told me that the grass is always greener where it’s watered, and a Zen teacher once told me that whatever you pay attention to grows. If you spend a thirty-day month counting your complaints, you’ll realize by month’s end how rotten your life is. If you greet each November day with an attitude of optimistic expectation, wondering what sort of blog-worthy moments of insight or inspiration will dawn today, you’ll never be disappointed.

“You make, you get.” This is a simple Zen truism, but it points to the same wisdom of the Christian motto, “Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find.” If you approach any November morning with an expectant attitude of “What interesting or inspiring thing will happen today,” that request will be answered. If you greet every November day with expectation, every November day will provide you with something of insight or interest. And if you prodigally post today the ingredients you’d intended for later in the week, you’ll somehow find that you still have plenty, your pantry filling with the miraculous manna of daily inspiration.