...something which prompted me to do some serious reflecting on exactly what I am doing here.
When I started blogging in 2009, I used this space to keep track of research for my senior thesis. I titled it, one could say rather immodestly, The Universal Story: A Painted Investigation of Figures Within Their Surroundings, Based on Daoism and Native American Philosophy, although the more I think about the act of story-telling--whether in visual, audio, or written form--it seems to be one of the most powerful tools we have to connect with one another while becoming irrevocably our own unique selves: one of the things that makes us human--universal indeed. Practically, blogging was also a handy and at the time trendy way to connect with other undergrads in my program who were documenting their research in a similar way.
When I left school, most of the time I'd once spent looking at art and thinking about epistemology of necessity changed to time I spent planning lessons and thinking about how to catch my years-behind high school students up to their more affluent peers. At the end of each day, the part of me that was crushed by this new burden wanted nothing more than to escape into a world inside a book, and escape I did. But I noticed that I read so fast I often left myself with a color, a feeling, an impressionist painting of what I'd read, and the details, the words which I could take with me, sort of flew out a mental window. So I very sporadically started writing some of them down here.
And now, when I find myself with more time (though never enough) to reflect and think and paint and draw and write, I've come back (full circle? ellipse? amoeba?) to something like the original purpose of this project--all the while coming to terms with the fact that I am not only a compulsive share-er (of all these thoughts and quotations and images and ideas) but also a compulsive stat-checker (of this blog). It's been really moving to see my words reaching both places I'd expect--like the US and Costa Rica, or in the case of posts about Australia or Azerbaijan, spikes in those respective countries--and places that are a surprise to me--like Reunion and Borneo.
It's strange and beautiful, I think, that I don't know exactly where this project is going, nor do I know exactly who it's going to. And yet, it's such a primal, crucial thing to share those things that grow inside us--really, that's all we have and all we're here for. So I'll do the only thing I can, which is to take a half-step back and see where all this leads.
Here are a few words from the introduction of Bird by Bird, a book on the act of writing, by Anne Lamott, which seem to fit quite nicely here:
"[Writing] provides you with some sort of primal verification: you are in print, therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled and stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal." xiv
"[I] knew what it was like to have someone speak for me, to close a book with a sense of both triumph and relief, one lonely isolated social animal finally making contact." xix
"I started writing sophomoric articles for the college paper. Luckily, I was a sophomore." xxi
"Do it every day for a while...Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things." xxii
"It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward." xxvi
"It is work and play together." xxix
And, should you feel so inclined, I'd be more than happy to read your comments or stories. (...seems only fair, a little quid pro quo, after all this time :) )
