Seeking Form

I find myself thinking about blogging a lot. Or specifically, how I don’t blog *enough*. Like there’s some magical optimum number of posts per week that I’m failing to hit publish on. Because, the thing is, I used to blog a lot. Often 2-3 posts a day. Back then it was about community and comments and conversation. Which, to be honest, is now mostly met for me through my engagement with FB. So, blogging needs to have a different function. And I haven’t figured out what that is.

In fact, I’m beginning to consider that maybe I’m just not a blogger. For the last couple of years, the majority of my writing has remained unshared. As intimate to my heart as poetry written on the inside of envelopes. Considering I used to share every scrap of writing, this is quite the turn around for me.

But, I like the slower pace of writing now. I like the sitting with, the being with. I like the gradual gestation. The permission to return and change and edit and tweak. I like the deepening. I like the dance.

So yes, maybe I’m not a blogger. At least, not in the way I’ve blogged before. And not in the way I seem to believe is “should” be done. Yet I yearn for a form that feels effortless and invitational – a form which holds space for the words and stories that long to unfurl, unspool, unfold, from me and through me.

I want what Virginia Woolf wanted…

‘There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one might make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.’ (Woolf 1983: 266)

Loose knit. Shadow. Drift. Embracing. Diary.

I give myself permission to create this for myself. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I can’t predict which direction the petals will escape from the bud. But I’m willing to try. I’m willing to try.