After letting the cats out at 5am, I turned on the heat and tucked myself back into bed for another 30 to 60 minutes of sleep. That's been my practice this past winter, delaying the start of my day until the chill has left the house, and it's a bit closer to dawn. But this morning, I could not go back to sleep. My mind was abuzz, thinking about an opening line for the first WinterizingMe blog.
The decision to try blogging again arose mostly from reading the giant tomb of the Twilightme blog that I'd had printed late in 2020. I started the Twilightme blog in 2007 and kept it up until 2018, though I only posted with great consistency for the first three years. What I like about keeping a blog and the reason I printed the book is that it's a great record of my life during those years with stories about family, friends, trips, books, movies, writing and sometimes philosophical thoughts. Reading those stories reminds me not only of events and people, but it allows me to witness the nature of my life and underlines what I value and enjoy.
Why did I stop blogging? I think the main reason had to do with posting to Facebook. Because I was working on a book and writing for regional publications, there was less time to write blog posts, but I could come up with a few sentences complimented by a picture or two for Facebook and accomplish something similar to blogging. Then I finished the book, the regional publications folded, and I got fed up with the social media platforms and bailed on Facebook. That's when I started pouring my thoughts and stories into email messages and texts. Clearly, I still had a need to gather my experiences and thoughts via writing.
But it didn't occur to me to try blogging again until I was reading through the Twilightme blog book, looking for posts I could photocopy to include in birthday cards. For many years, we've had a family practice of telling stories about the celebrant during his or her birthday gathering. For lots of reasons, including the pandemic, birthday gatherings aren't happening like they once did, and so those stories aren't being told, so my solution was to find a story about the person in Twilightme so I could continue the tradition--sort of.
Of course, I was reading many of the blog posts as I searched, and it was fun to read some of the things I wrote about writing in general and blogging in particular. In one post, I read called 1 Way to Realize Life, I committed with two other friends to journal for 1000 days. I immediately decided to recommit to that plan, and it was only a small leap a few days later to think about blogging again.
So here I go. The title for this second blog was inspired in part by another post in Twilightme called Winterizing. When I read this post, I knew it contained the concept of what I wanted in a second blog, the necessity for gathering, storing, and clearing as winter sets in. To those ideas, I also want to add the idea of rippling, and that's where the "me" in WinterizingMe comes in. I'd like to create a ripple like a rock dropped in a pond, a ripple that continues long after the rock disappears. The title also echos and recalls the Twilightme blog title which is undeniably the seed for this blog.
I don't really have an audience in mind yet, but for anyone who finds this blog, I look forward to having you along on my walk.
