Blogging Under a Bushel

For some reason, an ancient memory rose to the surface this snow-blanketed week, the combination of thought-bits and ponderings and a snatch of melody out of the ethers.

And so it is with the serendipity of blogging–a 13 year old reflexive impulse to “go public” with the most trivial and the most profound and personal private monologue that for some reason cannot rest content unless it takes on the illusion of public dialogue. Sharing is caring, they say.

This little light of mine. I thought at one time and for a number of years was convinced I knew what that writer’s light of mine was. Now, I’m not close to sure about it.

In the past few years, as you might have heard me angst-ing about here, not much light escapes the gravitational pull of the page the words are written on. I shine it not as frequently or with as much sense of reach into dimly lit places as in those earlier truly-connected years. Mostly now the beam comes back to its source for my own illumination. And I’m struggling to accept that this is enough.

But it is not enough, entirely. I fully appreciate the value of the blog as an archive of literally thousands of private epiphanies and “grampa tales.” On my ambitious days, I think that I might mine these million words for the occasional nuggets worth tossing into the editorial polishing machine to see what they would look like with more attention and as part of a larger story for an audience of flesh-and-blood readers.

A few Fragments over twelve Novembers (where my focus is just now) are worthy of glossing up to include in this third book that I will, in all likelihood, never finish in this lifetime–a book of monthly “dialogues” between the writer and his place in space and time.

More often than not, words and images compliment each other. So in my moments of zeal I imagine a book of about 40 thousand words, with full-color images. For that, an e-book more than the expense of printed color plates in a paper book, makes more sense. But this is only a theoretical discussion for the uncertain present.

Maybe I’ll let my little light shine for another spell. Or maybe I’ll just let apathy and laziness and the echo from an empty room blow it out. (Apologies to His Nefarious Self who, in the Sunday School tune, gets credit for extinguishing the heat and light.)

[su_box title=”THE REST OF THE STORY” style=”soft” box_color=”#e8d3a9″ title_color=”#235529″]Got it: just remembered one of the triggers for the memory of this old church tune: we did without power last week for 52 hours. We stumbled around in the dark for two long nights with “little lights” of fake candles powered by AA batteries. THAT little light of mine: I hope not to see it again for a long while! And the image–that I already had pulled up with the intention of posting with or without text–is the view from our church parking lot yesterday. So there you have at least some of the disparate elements that collided to trigger yet another rambling waste of bandwidth.[/su_box]