What is this blog about, anyway?
Any of you who follow my husband’s blog might know that he’s taking a course this summer called Social Web for Social Change. I’m not in the course myself, but I feel like I’ve learned an awful lot from it. Drew always gets out of class brimming with insights, and I’ve enjoyed watching him develop his own blogging presence and begin incorporating multimedia elements into it. So it follows that, learning vicariously through him, I’ve started to think about my own blog more. This has led to an unscheduled hiatus as I decided where I want this blog to go. (Of course, it doesn’t help that we’re in the middle of a move right now - these are just the upstairs books!)
photo by Andrew Jones
I originally began Three Seeds Under to develop an online presence for myself as a writer. I will use it to announce any publications and links to my online work. And of course, I will continue to review the books I love. However, I want this blog to be more than a blog about words, as much as I treasure them.
My tagline is “searching for wholeness in a fractured world.” I’m fairly upfront about the fact that I live with mental illness. I’ve struggled with depression since childhood. I also have ADHD, which was only diagnosed in my thirties, as is sadly the case for many women. Yet I don’t want Three Seeds Under to be a mental health blog. Rather, it truly is about the search for wholeness - for integrity.
When we live with integrity, we live as our whole selves, not our fractured selves. We live according to our deepest principles and beliefs. This is a challenge for all of us, no matter the chemical make-up of our brains. The world is not set up to make integrity easy. But then, nothing easy is ever worth doing.
I want to use this online space to celebrate the things that have helped me to find my center when I inevitably veer off course. Books are on that list, of course, as is my writing. But so too are many movies and songs, bits of philosophy, creativity, spirituality, and what I like to call the Ars Vitae (Latin for Art of Life) - all those little habits that help to draw out the joy in life. As John Crowley said in Little Big, “The things that make us happy make us wise.” I can’t claim wisdom, but I’m searching for it, as I’m searching for ways to live with more integrity.
If you are also on this journey, I invite you to share my path for awhile.
Originally published at Three Seeds Under. You can comment here or there.