sheri, of happinest, tagged me with this:
Borrowing, with permission from bookbabie, the following fabulous idea: what would you say if you had to summarize your life in only six words? Bookbabie got the idea from a book written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Expecting: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure. It is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Here are the rules:
1. Write your own six-word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!
Everything is path, even when off-road.
I tag YOU -- dear reader, whoever you are. (Unless you're sheri, in which case, you're off the hook.) Please let me know when you post your 6 word memoir.
#2 - A New Look
I thought I was going to re-do my layout to make it look more like spring over here, but honestly, this new look is much more reflective of my very current (as in my RIGHT NOW) emotional state, which I recognize is not particularly "spring-y."
The weather's beautiful. Outside my window, there are pink cherry blossoms marching up their black-brown branches against a bright blue sky. I feel even more amiss, I think, because that image is so incongruous with my emotional state: I need dark bare branching lacing across a dark gray sky.
It's still winter in my psyche. I'm still laying fallow -- or maybe I'm even newly fallow, but that's a different story.
It's all okay. I'm just still a season behind.
#3 -- Other Changes
Weatherstone has recently undergone an ownership change. It is a Java City store no more. I was in there today, and I miss the staff.
However, the new owners (Old Souls) are keeping the name. And they make the very best cookies in town (though this is a topic I need to get to more earnestly than I intend to at this moment).
It feels momentous to me; an opportunity to make metaphor, and yet, I am floundering a bit for exactly what meaning to make of it. I may come back to this later.
#4 -- Where I've Been
I'm not making excuses, I'm not. I can't start that because otherwise the next time I tarry between posts, I'll do as I've done this time and waste time coming back while I try to figure out how to explain why it has been so long. If there had been a clamoring mob asking and harassing me about my absence from this blog that might be one thing, but this is one of the thousands (millions?) of humble blogs that may attract a reader or two a week, and which exists mostly, I think, because of the writer's fear that if she stops writing she might die.
In this particular case, however, I can attribute the lapse in part to the fact that I've been taking a writing class since January (the December lapse before that was just, you know, holiday insanity), and any energy, not to mention time, that I've had to write has gone into homework. The class ended this weekend and I am more than a little bereft about it. It's left me with three gifts: 1. a complete story-arc for a novel; 2. a commitment to trying to get together a writing group; and, 3. a clarity about myself as a writer that is less apologetic and in need of external confirmation.
Of course I want readers. Of course I do. Of course if I write this novel (and I think I might actually) I hope to sell it. But I want to write because I am a writer the way some people are painters or dancers or musicians: writing is where I touch the face of god. It's the activity beyond all other activities in which I reach simultaneously inward and outward, when I become more than myself and myself absolutely.
Barf, I know. But this is my blogging dilemma: the time I spend blogging is typically my fingers barfing onto the keyboard -- it's not time I spend carefully crafting my words, being purposeful with each word. And it was fun to return to that kind of writing -- really careful (full of care) with each word, each image, each line and to remember the transcendence in that effort. I want to do more -- which while not incompatible with blogging, changes the purpose of and time available for blogging.
What does it all mean? Possibly nothing. Stay tuned.
a writer's group? um, hello?
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