Why Do I Blog?

Lately, the days have been growing shorter and although I left very early in the evening for Austin, it was quite dark when I got off the I-10 and onto the 71 heading west. I enjoy driving though not at night. What if a deer or raccoon dashed across? After the tense two and a half hour drive, my shoulders were all bunched up and my neck had stiffened. I unpacked and went straight to bed, but woke up well before dawn and reached out in the darkness for my laptop. Out of habit I punched in my email ID. There was something from Stratfor in my mailbox. On the urging of a friend whose passion is geopolitics, I had signed up for Stratfor’s email delivery. I flagged the article for later reading.

True to Stratfor’s claim that they do not simply publish news but deliver in-depth intelligent analysis, the lonely news article in my email inbox drew comparisons between the New York Landmarks plot and the Mumbai attack. This was the sort of intelligent, relevant to the times stuff that the geopolitics geek expected me to spout on my blog? Waaah! To add to my anguish, the words, Identity Crisis, that my eyes had grabbed from another blogger's had me going through an identity crisis myself. I pulled out all my posts and by midday my blog was blank. I did not feel any better.

What was the purpose of my blogging?

To write freely.

Does it matter what other people thought of it?

No. Well, actually, yes it does, but I have to get over that. This is about the rebuilding of me.

Fortunately, I had moved all my posts to the draft folder and not deleted them. I brought them all out again. Without audacity, the artist in me might just as well remain dead. At the moment, I honestly cannot deal with the kind of crazy things that's happening in the world. When I’m troubled, words start to leap about, as if a million millipedes were dancing all over my computer screen. I have to, have to, have to hold beautiful thoughts in my mind. Like the time when my painting was turning black because I was mulling over the past and I began to despair, a dragonfly flew into my garage-studio, hovered in front of the thickly layered painting that had a tar-like stickiness to it. Oh please don’t get stuck in the paints! I waved my arms, I waved my brush. The dragonfly turned toward me like a fighter plane and then took off into the sun, its wings shimmering with color, bringing back the radiance in me, in my painting.