375 days gone by- let's reclaim love
Maybe I've just been too super-busy to be joining the bulging ranks of bilious, boring bloggers eager for a ten-pence slot in already over-crowded clouds of information. Or maybe I've just been lost in those clouds- chasing threads with unexercised interest in agribusiness, poverty pruning, permaculture, psychedelic culture, global food distribution, raw food, hula-hooping, woodcarving, community co-operation, social enterprise - basically butterfly-catching (and missing...I don't have an armchair though). Many of these I would have done well to put into written words, especially given my increasingly gouda-shaped memory (almost said goldfish, but read today that apparently they have three month capacity to memorise, which ruins the reassuring sense that I once had that at least my memory was better than that of a goldfish) and the changes in thought processes that have occured, embracing a more positive, expansive view of my being on this very odd planet. I'd have liked to read back over the weeping beauty of life-changing meetings at Cosmo festival, The Move to London, the switch from being set to study a masters in migration studies in Amsterdam to becoming a full-time volunteer at ATD Fourth World, and present flirtations with eco building and ditching my CV for a raft of demonstrable capabilities beyond my rather honed skills in fretting, tea-buying and home-made hummus. To document the visions, flashbacks, inner debates, mess-ups and step-ups, colours, moods and half-read newspapers. Still, I don't see my life and the externalising of its subjective passing as something stable and linear, so what does it matter what's left out (especially given the artifice of writing, expanding a single thought into a book or contracting a mountain of inner turmoil into an unsmiley.
Enough abstraction of my really-not-so important year-long absence from blogging, whose upkeep always frustrated me anyway- even after a post-free week I'd sit back down and struggle with the imagined task of having to produce a coherent account of it, given my tendency to tangential trippery. How to move on? There are many issues I'd like to discuss with myself, to test my recall and provoke the re-capping that cements the knowledge. But so many blogs produce excellent renderings of every topic under the sun. Should I instead focus on the weird bits of life- my decision to create a new alphabet for giving out my postcode over the phone...echowhiskey has its charms, but how good it could be...some friends and I attempted the task in Amsterdam, and surprisingly the results evade me now. Or the ideas for stories I've had, to turn me into a children's author who sows the seeds of revolution with her images: ahem, a synaesthetic child at war with the five sensical doctrine, and something inventive about a cardboard box. Have not got past line 5 yet. Much remains in the realm of the imagined, so maybe this will spur me to action. Jeez- make my life proactive so that I can have a more interesting blog? Ahem.
So, tbc. Before I go and come, some recent influences: Nathan Barley, Daniel Pinchbeck, Aldous Huxley, Marlborough savvy b, my wunderbar housemate, Freeconomy, David's love of nature. As I say, tbc.
Enough abstraction of my really-not-so important year-long absence from blogging, whose upkeep always frustrated me anyway- even after a post-free week I'd sit back down and struggle with the imagined task of having to produce a coherent account of it, given my tendency to tangential trippery. How to move on? There are many issues I'd like to discuss with myself, to test my recall and provoke the re-capping that cements the knowledge. But so many blogs produce excellent renderings of every topic under the sun. Should I instead focus on the weird bits of life- my decision to create a new alphabet for giving out my postcode over the phone...echowhiskey has its charms, but how good it could be...some friends and I attempted the task in Amsterdam, and surprisingly the results evade me now. Or the ideas for stories I've had, to turn me into a children's author who sows the seeds of revolution with her images: ahem, a synaesthetic child at war with the five sensical doctrine, and something inventive about a cardboard box. Have not got past line 5 yet. Much remains in the realm of the imagined, so maybe this will spur me to action. Jeez- make my life proactive so that I can have a more interesting blog? Ahem.
So, tbc. Before I go and come, some recent influences: Nathan Barley, Daniel Pinchbeck, Aldous Huxley, Marlborough savvy b, my wunderbar housemate, Freeconomy, David's love of nature. As I say, tbc.