I’m single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber. It seems like everyone stopped blogging in around 2015 In the intervening years folks would post “I really should get back to this” blog entries but then would find themselves deep in Facebook world where their writing was hard to find and search and sometimes limited only to friends. Or they would post on twitter where the link sharing would happen but without the added reflection and sometimes you’d have to battle bots and trolls to participate. Sure twitter threads are okay. But why not just blog?
(And when I say “folks” I mean me. Projection is a specialty of mine)
I get why folks don’t blog and would rather post on Facebook. It seems like it needs too much work, seems too polished. Requires a regular schedule. So I want to make it easier with a few things that might help you get blogging. (Again, even)
Get a free platform with an RSS feed. If you don’t know what that means, just sign up at Blogger or WordPress. Those sites have good mobile interfaces so you can write from your phone (like I’m doing right now). They come with great templates. They are upgradeable and transferable to your own domain and they can export your posts. An RSS feed is how we can subscribe to your writing via a newsreader like Inoreader.
Don’t be perfect. It’s a blog, not the front page of the Globe and Mail. Think out loud, make typos (typos drive engagement, lol), put half formed ideas out there. Post whenever you want. Whatever you want.
Don’t worry about your brand. I think this one hamstrung me once I had a professional redesign my site in 2015. My brand IS learning and curiosity and half thought out ideas that folks are interested in. I support innovation and learning. That’s messy and edgy sometimes. Also I’m human. It’s nice to read words written by a human. But I don’t blog to sell my brand.
Give stuff away. If you make things, give some of them away. Blogging is a gifting culture. We up lift one another. My site here is full of stuff that I have made and others have made that has been released into the wild. Generosity is beautiful. Having said that, let us know how we can hire you or buy your art, because that’s how you make a living and it’s nice to give back.
Share links and quote people. Sometimes a blog is a place for your opinions or personal thoughts. Also take time to share good things on the web. The etymology of “blog” is a contraction of the word “weblog” which comes from the idea that we log cool things that we find on the web. You want to know who is REALLY good at that? Dave Pollard especially his periodic link collections. Incredible things to read and think about.
Comment on stuff you read. Facebook has done a marvellous job of colonizing conversation. I have seen some amazing threads there with all kinds of useful content shared and explored. Same on twitter. But, can we find them again? Are they indexed and easily accessible? Nope. They are fleeting. Facebook and Twitter are happy they happened because it improves their semantic learning, but they aren’t interested in your community or your colleagues or you. So go directly to people’s blogs and share your thoughts. I am interested in you.
Basically I’m encouraging you to blog with just as much care and attention as you do with a Facebook post or a tweet. but by blogging you are doing it outside of those places in the wild where everyone can see it and participate. You don’t need to battle trolls or get drawn down algorithmically generated attractor basins because of what you write. You will be free.
What other tips do you have?
This morning this quote came through the email via Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. it’s Thich Nhat Than writing on the Christian practice of communion.
The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.
If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107.
I love that. It reminds me of the power of acknowledging the simple and everyday sacred with a simple and everyday ritual. It uses a mindful practice to raise the ordinary to the sacred.
About seven years ago I was working at a conference called Awakening Soul as a facilitator and as a poet who captured the keynote presentations and the harvests from the world cafes I was leading. One of the speakers was John Phillip Newell, a prolific writer on Celtic Christianity informed by his time as warden of the monastery on Iona in the Hebrides.
His keynote contained a similar idea to Thay’s about the Eucharist. He spoke about the cosmology of matter and meaningfulness. He said that the bread in the Eucharist stood in for “the matter that matters.” Somehow in the dance of speaker and poet we also added that the wine is about the spirit that flows. The matter that matters and the spirit that flows. A simple ritual used to acknowledge the profound meaning of Jesus being together with his dearest friends on the last night of his life. If you have been with a dying person or in a situation like that you know the feeling of that moment. Only at birth and death does one experience it.
Later that night Newell and me and five other people all found ourselves talking around a dining table in our shared accommodation. We got on to telling the birth stories of our children and as the night deepened, the stories became more and more profound. Not all the stories were good news One was about a still birth. Others were funny like the way Caitlin gripped my knees so hard that the two of us were screaming in different kinds of pain when our son was born, much to the midwife’s amusement.
It was late in the night when our circle of stories drew to a close but before we all went to bed I suggested that we mark the end of this very sacred experience with a small communion. All we had was a bottle of Laphroaig whisky and a bar of Bowen Island chocolate. And so we passed these two elements to each other offering the simple blessing: this is the matter that matters and this is the spirit that flows. And it truly transformed our little gathering into something quite sacred.
Today I stood on the beach you see in the photo above, in a very isolated and sacred place on the south flank of Haleakala on Mau’i. It is a place where the first Hawaiians arrived on this island, a black cobble beach with incredible waves and the stunning 8000 foot high flank of the volcano behind. And as I stood there I felt my father very strongly. He sailed in these waters as a naval officer in the 1950s and he knew the power of the simple and transcendent. He knew deep in his bones about the communion that I am talking about. he knew to take time to stop and acknowledge it. That knowledge served him well in his death back in December and it has served me well in my grief journey since then.
And it served me well today, remembering in a simple act that “this is the matter that matters, and this is the spirit that flows.” That little prayer is your gateway to remembering that you belong to the cosmos.
Maybe returning everything to the blog.
Just perusing through some of the stories of the Desert Fathers and found this little anecdote.
“Abba Joseph asked Abba Pastor, ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied, ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say: “Who am I?” and so judge no one.’”
That’s probably good advice before I go on Twitter.
Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.