New Directions in Blogging

Mind boggling blogging!

Follow this blog!

Now, shall I join the blog roll game and obliterate my links?

I hesitate . . .

my browser crashed a month ago and I lost all my links.

All my links!

But I had my blog.

So, here is this relatively minor problem that I need to attend to. With complex instructions I have not got the patience to read. I added the Follow gadget.

It is even more critical as I've realized that some links are now obsolete and were never updated.

I feel I've been jerked into a new century.

A return?

I've been sojourning in a strange land with no means of navigation which has led more to inaction and pondering my location rather than choosing any particular direction in hopes of finding my way back to the land I once I knew. I often wonder if I will ever find my way back!

Every now and then I stand up and take a few steps in a direction, only to return to the stump I've been sitting on for fear that it is the wrong direction. The sun rises and the sun sets and I still sit. I know which direction is which--but I don't know where I am, so directions are meaningless.

Sometimes I convince myself that anywhere would be better than here. There is nothing here but ghosts and they don't talk.

What can I say--could I go through the kind of stress I've been through this past year and a half and not spiral down into the depths of the dark cave of depression? Every day is a new day--because no thread from yesterday hangs limply over my head for me to grasp and work with. It seems my lethargy is contagious because the landscape seems changeless as those who are supposed to be working toward a solution seem as discontinuous as I am and so things just remain where they are, unmoved.

I had hoped to return to blogging a month ago and I made one weak stab in that direction--it was great to feel a moment of inspiration of any kind. Then my browser began to act up and I deleted it from my hard drive. With it I lost my links, my Blogger identity (I'd forgotten it) and the means to find it. I also lost all my other links--my friends, too.

If I visit here, what I am going to have to do, and I am obviously hesitant to do, is write about what I don't want to think about. Past journeys through this dark land have taught me that when I finally begin to feel the need to struggle against the darkness, I'm on my way up out of the abyss. I always used to seek counseling at this point. More than once I've finally just scolded my counselor and said, "I just have to DOOOO something!" Okay, so I am prone to depression--but according to the psychiatrist I've never been clinically depressed and so some suffer far more depth than I do. This is bad enough, thank you.

My health continues to bounce around--some days I feel great and some, terrible. I realized that I almost dread the days I feel great because they seem to precede the days I feel terrible. I think fear has a great deal to do with why I'm stymied and simply sitting here on this stump not doing anything. I just don't know what the future will bring--will I ever be able to live in my own home? Will I have to leave all and go live where the mold isn't so prevalent? Is this controllable or is this going to get worse? And finally--are these days the beginning of the end? Will it kill me? The weird thing is that I've been asking these questions for more than two years now and I have no more answers now than I did then.

Hope that I remember to get batteries for my camera so that I can take photographs of my home and my companions to share with you. And hope that I'll remember to come back and post and that I'll remember where my blog is, too.

Renaming blogs:

A friend of mine has set up a new blog with a new thrust for his new focus. Noting that, it occurred to me that I might do the same, except that I am not positive that I have a new focus. No, my blogs title goes way, way back. I've used it for my blog since '04 even as I have changed the location of it three times. Before that it was the title I used for my private journal.

I'm thinking of calling it, "The Walking Stick". I'm still considering the implications of the meaning of it. It is symbollic of my life and my view of life. My blog is like a walking stick for a journey over rough terrain. I hear an echo from way back even to poetry that I wrote while I was still in high school. I'm always thinking and speaking in terms of paths, crossroads, stumbling stones, climbing mountains and reaching summits.

Unfortunately, the photograph above doesn't do justice to my real walking stick. Creating such a stick was a spiritual experience. When the wood was new and fresh as its soft flesh created curls at my feet as I cut away the bark, I learned a new appreciation of living wood and our connection to nature in a way that I'd never experienced it before. The rest of the journey, and an interesting one, then took several more years.

As a Cub Scout leader, my husband and I walked out near the river to find young saplings we could cut for the boys to have an end of the year project to do. The largest was a recently dead pecan tree with a natural balance to it, although it wasn't straight. It was too large and too heavy. So, in an effort to trim weight off of it, it occurred to me that I could carve it. I picked up the various leaves I found and used them as patterns and worked leaves down the trunk of it. At the very bottom I copied the intertwined vines of a trumpet vine. The top, however, remained uncarved because I had no idea what to carve on it. Then one day I felt inspired to create wings. I had an hour to spare before I intended to go to the nursing home to visit my father and so I began to carve the wings. I just roughed them out. Then I heard the phone ring. I will always wonder about that particular moment of inspiration and why it turned out to be that day. Since then my son has given me some scouting emblems for it. It has a great big buffalo on the front of it from his visit to Philmont. I suppose that it will continue to grow as the years go by, a support for uncertain ground.

The concerns of the day:

There are always a great many concerns, of course.

I'm currently working hard to close out of all my old ISP business. Along with changing email addresses and setting up a new blog, there is the difficulty of what to do about all the archives from the old blog. I decided to print them out and take them down to my local copy center and have them bound into volumes. Who reads old archives, anyway?

And so, as a writer, I have just discovered a whole new difficulty with printing. Shortly before Christmas my old printer died and I bought a new one. The cartridges are so small that to print any large amount of work means buying several. I thought the old ink cartridges were expensive, but they could print several reams of paper. The total cost on this current printing project is going to go through the roof. Not to mention the necessity of this interruption in the printing process in order to go buy more. I'll have to find a solution or my old habit of printing out my current WIP every six months or so for review will be prohibitive.

Otherwise, it will be interesting to go back and read all that stuff. Again, it points to the fact that a little bit of writing adds up to a huge volume over time.