Home Sweet Blog

I am slowly coming to realise that I miss updating my blog each day. I find that by coming and writing here, I come to unusual subjects, thoughts and ideas. Sometimes when I have nothing to write about, a post appears from nowhere as I sit with my laptop. I think this is what I miss most, those things that come when I have nothing.

I never started writing this blog for others. It was always about me. The fact that others find it interesting is a bonus. Maybe I am ending up back where I started.

When I first started I didn't read other blogs because I hadn't found any. I slowly found interesting blogs and started to follow them. Some of the writers became good friends, a real part of my life. Others were blogs I read in passing, some were busy blogs I admire greatly and read voraciously but commented little, others flooded my life with visual beauties.

Eventually it got too much. I couldn't keep up. Slowly I stopped reading the vast majority of blogs that I follow. I had overdosed on other people's lives and needed to spend a little more time living my own. So I did and then I stopped writing a daily post because that got too much as well. I had done it for months and months and I guess i needed a break from that too.

I think it is really important to think about what you want and need when getting involved in things online. I am part of four yahoo groups, three book groups, a writing group and four social networks. I have email and facebook correspondence with friends and relatives. I have online games such as My Fairyland and Wordscraper which I play against my Dad. I have too much!

I have collected all these things and slowly I am finding that they are crowding out the things that blogging first bought to my life. I can spend the whole day online trying to keep up with it all. My crafting has dropped to a little beading in front of the TV. I havn't painted silk, art journaled or anything else in quite a while. Little Dogs explorations of new places have become less frequent. I research fewer topics to write about on my blog. Most of the activities I do are there to try and make me better or to increase my creativity and assist with what I produce but they have gotten to the point where they are stopping it, not helping it....

So what do I want? I want to write my blog. I want to play My Fairyland and Wordscraper and chat via email with my mates. I want to make social networks work for me, not I for them. I want to slowly and gently work on A Witch Alone. I want to slowly finish The Artist's Way. I am not sure it is the right time for The Joy Diet, I am actually pretty happy in myself! Do I want to reset my yahoo groups so I don't get all the email updates? not sure...

But writing, here, has come to be pretty important to me. I think it is a gentle form of the Morning Pages. A lot less brutal than them but things still come out....

So the ride will continue and perhaps a little more frequently than recently too....

Time Turns

Today is a quiet day (thankfully). It has all been good and fun and lovely but I am so tired now.

Today is a day off. Peace and quiet and catching up with myself.

Today is a mere breather because tomorrow I have committed to going to the races....

This week has made me realise that I use my blog sometimes to avoid doing things. Starting this blog has both opened my life up and closed it down. I spend too much time reading blogs. It isn't sustainable. It is an avoidance of doing.

I do think that sometimes I go a bit mad on crafting and wear myself out on it. The nice thing about beading is that it is a slow steady sort of a craft. Not likely to wear you out. I have started a bracelet for my Mum on my loom as we were talking about what she would like last weekend. It is in silver and grey and I am enjoying doing it.

This last ten days has been full. Over time at work. Flying around the country. Going to a wedding. Going shopping / browsing in an upmarket town with my parents. Intensive house cleansing. Walks with family to local places. A trip to St Ives by train to sit on the beach and wander round shops. A shopping trip with my sister. An outdoor production of Tartuffe (fantastically funny).

It was lovely but manic.

I also received a few early birthday pressies which I assisted in choosing... In my window is a lovely set of stained glass hearts in pink, red and purple strung downwards. I have a lovely blue glass with gold foil marble which sits on top of a bottle stopper. I have a set of brightly coloured silicon kitchen utensils. I have a lovely set of nesting kitchen things in all the colours of the rainbow including a bowl, colunder, sieve, measuring jug and measuring cups.

I think I may start posting a little less. Reading a few less blogs. Doing a little more. Time for a slightly different balance. Some things have been very much neglected. I want to spend more time on The Artists's Way. I want to finish Wreck This Journal. I am soon to start the Joy Diet. I want to make my house beautiful with objects I have made and altered. I want to finish my list of crafting obligations. I want to get started on my manic list for Christmas and the surrounding birthdays....

I will still be here but it has all been building and building and now it is time for those blossoms to bloom fully. Harvest is here. No doubt winter will see me brooding and returning more to this....

Houston, We Have a Problem...

Last night F was at work. I had no commitments and nothing I had to do. The e-verse swallowed my night and I didn't even find the time to post. Even more bizarre, I forgot I hadn't posted.

Last week I didn't feel so hot and I got very behind reading blogs. Although I only had 24 hours maybe when I didn't read anyone else's blog it took me most of the weekend to catch up.

Life has started fitting in around blogging. I need more sleep. I need more creative time.

Blogging bought so much in to my life. My life was a little directionless and lacking in breadth. I quickly found that blogging helped me to think. It also helped me to prioritze and set goals. It expanded my opportunities and my creative life has gone from nothing to, well, what it is now. And without blogging, this would not have happened, at least not yet and not as easily.

Thing is all these good things blogging has bought me, have started to be eclipsed by blogging itself.

I love the people I have met and the friends I have made. Some are closer than others. Some blogs I just lurk on and have little actual contact with the writer. Some blogs I have found don't really match my interests as well as I thought. Some I still read because there is some occasional nuggets.

I just counted how many blogs I follow and was astounded to discover I was only a couple short of 100. OK so most of those don't post everyday but still....

I know some people decide to post less regularly so they can comment and be more present in the community. I don't think this decision would be so good for me. I have discovered that I need to write. I will obviously continue to comment and enjoy friendships where they may blossom but this excessive schedule of blog reading is just getting too much! The world is full of interesting people and I just can't keep collecting their blogs to read....

I have blog candy to make, pay it forwards to make, journal wrecking, postcrossing, my fairy garden on facebook, three different yahoo art groups, 101 things to do in 1001 days, a Little Dog to walk, an F to spend time with and a world to explore.... I want to do all these things and be fully present in the blog-e-verse but i can't, something has to give....

I need to bring things back into balance... I have a slight blog problem. Do they have a bloggers anonymous?

Invisible

Sometimes some of my aspects feel invisible. I am some of the time a Mother. I have a stepson who has spent regular time with us since F and I first met (almost - he didn't know about me for a couple of months...). This role, this persona of mine is not recognised or acknowledged...

I never receive a birthday card, in fact I don't think he could tell you what my month my birthday is even in....

I don't receive a Christmas present. F is doing well if he gets a bad bottle of wine...

I don't get to go to Sports Day.

I don't get to go to School Plays.

I don't get cute drawings bought home from school.

I don't ever get a card.

But how does S see me? A couple of weeks a go he says that he likes it at ours best because sometimes we go out. He is still giving me hugs, even in his near teenage-ness, often without me having to ask. He comes and watches TV with me and things sometimes in preference to being with his Dad. He listens to me. He allows me to tease him about girls and things and although he would never admit it publicly, he loves these teasing conversations and gives as good as he gets.

I have tucked him in at night. I have read him stories. I have bought him clothes. I have washed him. I have helped with homework. I have told him off. I have fed him. I have laughed with him. I have cried with him. I have given him money. I have bought him presents. I have cooked for him....

But as a Mother I am invisible.

If anything happened to his mother, although I could never replace him, I could be me and look after him.

Nobody sees me as Mother though. My parents don't send presents for him at Christmas. They often take my sister and her kids out (they live much closer than I do) but they never send money for us to go out somewhere nice with S. They do send me money sometimes but S is below their horizon and they do not see me as a mother either. I don't think they see me as understanding some of the problems and issues of raising children.

As a mother I am invisible. But there must be people out there who are completely invisible....

Beggars on street corners...

Children locked in cellars...

The child in a class who is neither clever or requiring assistance and is quiet.

The women of certain cultures, in certain families....

The person who is abused but those who know are scared of the abuser and look the other way...

People in solitary confinement....

I read or heard a story once about a child who was ignored by everyone. No one saw her anywhere. Slowly she began to fade away until she really was invisible... How sad... I think people would fade away in some way. But I am not ignored, I am acknowledged as an important person in S's life by him in so many ways.

I think there must be people in blogland who feel invisible too. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could find all the new blogs and bloggers somehow and welcome them in?

Trust

Last week sometime there was an accident. It closed a road and was all over the traffic reports as I drove home. I later discovered it had been closed for hours. A cyclist had been knocked off and critically injured. It was touch and go for a time but they got over the worst and now face a long and slow recovery.

I don't know the cyclist.

I have never met them.

I do however know someone who knows them very well.

It is like that down here. Sometimes it seems that everyone knows everyone else. I had only lived down here a couple of years when I met F but before long we discovered that we knew about ten people in common. Everybody knows everybody else. If you sit down with a stranger for long enough you will discover a connection, even if it is a little tenuous. For F he sometimes discovers the stranger is a relative, several generations removed.

I went to one of F's work do's and discovered his new colleague was an old college friend.

I have a job going door to door promoting stuff and I meet F's first ever boss and an old family friend who clearly remembers him as a baby.

I work somewhere with confidential records that I have to sort and get to see more than I ever wanted to about an old neighbour, an old colleague of F's and the daughter of a near neighbour. Not in a bad way, just in a sad way...

These are just some connections. It happens all the time down here. I sit in the office at work and listen to people discover that such and such a friend of someone is suspected of having an affair with someone else's Mother. That the person who was stabbed was someone's relative. That the killers went to school with so and so. That someone knows my future brother-in-law.

Maybe in this context my unwillingness to put in my blog anything that could identify me to easily makes sense. I don't want my faith, my views and my feelings to be something people have a bit of gossip about. They are my private me, not my public me. They are not things I wish to discuss with the future m-i-l over Sunday lunch. I don't want to be that witch who lives on such and such a road because then people have expectations and chances are I won't want to meet them.

That is not to say that I am shy and don't want any of you to know who I am. A number of you know my real name and email me. A number of you have my address for art swaps and things. It is the random people who come by blogs or find them in searches, who leave nasty comments (not that I have had any but we all read blogs that have had this I expect) that I don't want to know who I am.

I have to say that generally people I know do not have the address of my blog. F does and Red. My Mum knows about it and I wouldn't have a problem with her reading it. If she read it though, the rest of my family would know to. The thought of telling my recently baptized (by their choice) niece and nephew what a witch is doesn't sound like fun. The thought of my Dad having to read about my feelings would make both of us uncomfortable. F only reads my blog now when he wants to get another take on how I am doing, the last time I know of was when big Dog died.

So what has brought all this on? I have a new follower. A very, very talented photographer (Hello Simon!). His blog is full of places I know. I know the names of some of the un-named and seemingly obscure places shown in photos. I suspect we live in roughly the same area.

In blogland, you slowly find and become associated with other blogs with similar focuses to yours. You can become associated with several different communities. I am part of a witchy / spiritual b-community, art journaling b-community, art postcard b-community and now I have made my first link into the Cornish b-community. This is a really big thing for me....

I think I am going to continue being cagey on my blog about my identity and the identities of those I know. I think I am going to open my arms wide to the Cornish b-community and trust that those that come to find my blog through this new link won't try and play detective and piece together any of the clues. Trust that I won't suffer from the negativity that others have and if I do that it will be contained within the e-verse and not spill into my life here in Cornwall.

So hello and be welcome here Simon..... and anyone who wants to see some really good photo's of this beautiful part of the world that I am lucky enough to live in, head on over to his blog....

I Need

Clairedulalune recently posted about typing 'your name' needs into google and seeing what comes up. She found the results quite interesting. I didn't think much of it until I had a bored few minutes earlier... My results were very different....

I need some faith
I need a facebook group
I need to investigate possible misuse of AWARE funds
I need to understand that one date is not enough
I need replacing
I need to modify my shell slightly
I need to give my pen a rest
I need to be tightly controlled
I need more hugs, I've truly had a tough day...
I need someone to lodge a Police Report

Some of these are more than a little bemusing but others are startlingly clear. I do need to have more faith, I do need more hugs. I often misuse my funds. I do feel my body could use a little replacement, modification and control - maybe then it wouldn't be so fat and unhealthy. Not sure about Facebook groups or police reports... I also think the one date is not enough might refer to being impatient...

It filled a few minutes and made me think and bought a smile to my face... What more can you ask?

Kit Cat

I read this fantastic post yesterday and it got me thinking. I love the way sometimes if you have some aspect of yourself you are struggling to understand or some concept that isn't fitting, so often someone will come along and add a piece of the puzzle on their blog.

Synchronicity is so alive and well here.

That is not to say synchronicity is always entirely positive. Death seems to have stalked the beloved animal friends of several blog writers recently. I hope it has finished for now.

Anyway back to Quaker Pagan Reflections.... Cat was writing yesterday about the need for fallow time. She was saying that if she has been having a very spiritual time or going through an intense period of development she starts to crave downtime. Another walk in nature will over-charge and sometimes she has to step away and eat junk food and play computer games. She puts it far better than I could...

Basically, sometimes I worry when I feel that my development is slowing, when I am striving to learn and grow, the lulls make me fret. I have been fretting a little about how I sometimes feel it has all slowed up. When I started the blog and started reading and learning and moving it was so great and I had such a buzz. That sudden spiritual spurt couldn't last but I gave myself a hard time as it slowed.

So what am I doing now? Waiting for the next learning spike? Waiting to feel my connection with all that is reaffirmed again? No, maybe I should. Maybe I should listen to my guilt and carry on striving. Maybe I should just except that now isn't a time when I feel as connected as I have, that work and everything else has stepped in a little.

Of course if I spent a little less time chasing creativity, I might have more time to be spiritual. How do I go about being more spiritual? The creativity feels right for now as does learning more of the stories of the land around me.

Of course very little of either of those or anything else will be happening this week. There will be no weekend off for me this week but 4 days of 6.00 starts, three of which will grow into 12 hour days. I am someone who needs a lot of sleep - a hold over from my days of Glandular Fever and Chronic Fatigue. This means by the time I get home, shower and eat, there won't be much time left, for anything really....

So why am I doing this? Because I am part of a team and my team needs to get this done. There is of course a little money involved as well....

I doubt I will feel like blogging so yesterday I sat down and researched four posts that will appear without me even having to log on.... Maybe this is my blogging lull?

Benefits of Blogging

Blogs are something I have only recently discovered but I am very, very smitten with them. I started this blog for me but it has been far better so far than I expected. I discovered / remembered that I like writing. I get a lot out of putting my thoughts and feelings down, although I think a lot, it doesn't necessarily mean my thoughts are organised. Writing my thoghts has really helped me to organise my thoughts more. This also really helps with moving on and excepting things. There is something so final and complete about writing things down that helps them to be completed.

Another thing I love about blogging is that it has bought people into my life. Really lovely cool people who are interested in what I have to say. Sometimes the comments feel like my own personal cheering committee. I have made friends via blogging in such a short space of time and I expect to make more in the future...

Blogging also helps see inside other peoples lives. I love getting share the lives and thoughts of other people on similar paths to me or paths I would like to be on. I love Mel's blogs for the way our paths sometimes reflect each other and this bouncing back helps me grow more. I love Siobhan's beautiful pictures and the way she captures beauty in the everyday things around her. I love Miss Daisy's raw honesty in her blog and I wish I could hold her hand a little. I love photos from Norway, eye witness accounts of the effect of the coming inaugaration on Washington DC, doodles and mandalas, tales from small holdings... I love that these people are willing to share their thoughts, talents and creativity. I find blogs inspiring and eye opening.

I often press the next blog button to see what I get and I wish I could read some of the blogs I find. Beautiul artwork and the odd word I understand suggests I might love to chat to this person. But I can't. I don't speak their language. I pass these blogs on by with regret, wishing I could explore this other person. Blogs make the world smaller and help me to understand the lives of others. Language may be a barrier but it doesn't stop me looking at a person and thinking I wish I could get to know you.

It isn't always easy thinking of something to write when you have had another dull day at work. I struggle sometimes. I wanted my blog to be an oasis of calm and spiritual enlightenment. Sometimes my negativity about things creeps in and I am not sure how I feel about that. I guess as this journal was started for me and my needs, i should cut myself some slack. I don't want things to become a grumble fest though. So I must find myself things to write about on those evenings that follow a day where nothing interesting has happened... This so far is the only slightly bad thing about blogging. Writing a blog doesn't automatically make me calm and spiritually enlightened...

My blog has caused me to be inspired to write a moon journal. This came up in Mel's blogs first and then further reading about woman's special connection to the Goddess and the Moon. I have come to understand the power writing a journal has but for me the audience (or potential audience) is the catalyst. My moon journal shall be private and of very little interest to others but I hope it will be of great use to me.

S chose to go shopping today to spend some money he had. I left the men to go to a games shop and went to an art shop. I had a couple of things I wanted to buy and I found them but I still had that feeling that there was something else I should buy. Then something caught my eye and a ping went off in my head. I went to investigate. It turned out to be a notebook with a cover that wrapped all the way round and fastened with a magnetic flap. Lovely pictures of horses cover the book and they glow with blues and violets highlighted with silver and pink and turquoise. A beautiful and private book that will allow no accidental peeking. My moon journal is born and may it bring as many blessings as my blog has!