Journal. More meta-thinking; the virtues of shedding
The sky is just getting light, and the different trees are beautifully silhouetted. The pines are so wonderfully shaggy compared to the spruce, and the mountain looks fuzzy on the edges. It should be a clear day. Good for the spirits, good for my solar lanterns.
I used to be perplexed when re-reading old journals why sometimes I started with a descriptive paragraph and sometimes dived right in and then realized it was all about the season and hours of daylight. Hard to write about what I’m seeing out the window when the curtains are closed and it’s dark out. I will miss that grounding in the physical world as fall deepens, but there you are.
Wow. Even in those few minutes, the sky has noticeably lightened. When it happens, it happens fast.
I’m actually enjoying going digital for the journal. If I slow down my typing to a crawl, I can approximate the pace of handwriting and have my thoughts flow in the drifty-daydreamy way I enjoy. I don’t end up with reams of paper to lug around. I don’t have handwriting to reread after the fact. :D I can stare out the window while I do it—even more drifty-daydreamy.
On the downside, I will end up never throwing old entries away—digital is too out of sight, out of mind—and that’s unfortunate. My thoughts aren’t so precious that I have to keep them forever. I like the shedding of weight that paper forces on me in tiny spaces.
Shedding seems to be a theme lately. Honing in on my values was illuminating—I realized how bedrock they’ve been all along, and how much of what I thought I “had” to do was overlay. It’s the same with the “new” overall framework I’ve been slowly unearthing. It’s actually always been there, but with an overlay of cultural messaging I’ve had to shake off. Then there’s the van—the ultimate shedding of excess baggage. It’s all been unexpectedly confidence building—less of a self-improvement project than a claiming of what has been my own all along.
Speaking of shedding—I begin to understand what…was it Laura Michet? said about not using BearBlog’s Discovery feed as social media. I have liked the (mostly spurious) sense of cummunity there, and I enjoy browsing the Most Recent page—there really are a lot of good surprises. But there’s also a lot of dross and unnecessary drama and even cynical manipulation. Overall I don’t think it’s the best way to spend limited energy. RSS feeds and their little “Unread’ notices become another nagging to-do list and site needing decluttering, but that may be worth it.
I think I will also go back to the free plan. It’s all I had originally meant to do, but then to write that one response piece and have it read, I had to pay. I have mostly not been at ease with that since. Being discoverable is good, but it’s not my priority. I just want a place to off-load my thoughts. There’s something about the Publish button that says “done and dusted” in a way that works for me. I could certainly just set “make discoverable” to False, but I don’t see the logic of doing that and paying when I could just not pay and accomplish the same thing and have a few extra bucks in my pocket. I have another two or three weeks to decide.
(On the off-chance someone is reading this and has Thoughts, hello, and by all means, please tell me.)
It’s now fully light, and the robins are calling and strutting. It’s time for breakfast.