This is post number five hundred on this blog. Five hundred times I have found something to speak about. For this post… it should be something different.
So many possibilities, but the most fitting comes as a suggestion from my best friend. This post should be about how blogging has changed my life, or perhaps how my life has changed since I began blogging. Not exactly the same thing, but they work together well.
I first encountered blogdom when I ran into Tam’s Arms Room. I recall doing a Google search on an antique military rifle, and stumbling across her work. From there, a link to her other blog, View from the Porch. From there... to here… has been a real journey. Along the way I have made friends, and more. Along the way I learned so much about myself, reflected in the mirrors of other peoples eyes.
I was writing before blogging. Mostly articles and posts on Surplusrifleforum.com, but other forums as well. Before that (and still) for my career, and long before that, articles and a few newspaper columns. In almost every case I wrote for personal interest, but didn’t write personal topics. Mausers and motors were on the agenda, but not my life and certainly not me.
Blogging changed that. Blogging changed me. Blogging changed my life.
Holy cow Batman, ain't YOU in the wrong place!
This blog site is more like the random bits of thoughts, ideas, and happenings
that fill the cracks in the world. All important, but not usually life changing.
Read, enjoy, rant, or maybe nod your head in bewilderment......
Almost nine months ago to the day. How much more fitting can that be, since I now feel like a person reborn? Shedding straight jackets and removing blindfolds like Houdini, only to find I have escaped from a prison of my own making into a freedom also of my own design. The years lived behind bars forged by my own hand... maybe they were necessary. A shell within which to grow slowly, and safely. I can't say yet, it's all too new. For now I am looking at everything with eyes newly opened, and it's a lot to take in and fit into the framework of a new life.
Everything in my life is being reevaluated.
Writing a blog comes after reading others... and there amongst my newly adopted tribe I found those who could and would share their lives. They unknowingly led me to my own ability to open up and write about myself, and in so doing learn about myself. What I learned was stunning, at least to me. There was a whole different 'me' that I had never met. This person who now takes photographs in search of beauty, who writes poetry to explain feelings, who reads others words with a reaching mind. This person, who had all my memories but applied them with a freshly wakened mind, turned out to be me.
The hatching was not an easy one, and it's still going on. Oh, most of the old me is still around, still a part of me. I'm still a teacher, and loving it. I still shoot, still have my lifelong interests in firearms, reading, computers, technology, people, and all the other things that make me what I am. Now... there's just more. I still think Ayn Rand had a clue, and the Robert Heinlein should have designed our government. I still think liberalism is a corrupt religion and that Congress (fully manned) should be walled off and forgotten as a bad idea. I'm still me, but I'm not the same me by a long shot.More important.... like stars shining in a dark evening sky.... are the people I now consider part of my life. Met and unmet, those bloggers of my tribe who I read daily make up my extended family. Should I list them, link to them? No... you know who you are... All the people whose lives now matter to me, who I care about. The old 'me' would never have given a damn.
Most important... blogging led me to the person who completed me.
Sometimes people are meant to share lives... and I now understand that too.
Reflecting back over five hundred posts.... what has blogging been to me?
Through it, I found reason to live, grow, and change. I found life. I found myself.
Live brightly, brightly
Eyes open to the future
hand in hand, my world
5 comments:
This gave me goosebumps.
Transformation from a cocoon to the butterfly is a beautiful thing.
Congratulations!
I just posted #301.
This is one of the reasons why I love blogging. It helps us to discover new facets of ourselves, sometimes through the simple act of writing, sometimes through the mirror of other bloggers' perceptions. Congratulations on post #500, and most of all, on emerging from your cocoon to the bright morning sunlight of new possibilities!
As you know if you read back in Skywritings days, I started blogging when a close friend I knew through work, who I corresponded with regularly during his cancer treatment, a published on fiction writer, told me I had a knack for it. He said I should take the little stories and such I sent to him to cheer him up, or make him think and start posting them, and I started blogging then, back in early 2006. Tom's gone now but the blog grew and grew, evolving into a new one, that's different and more private and free. It's brought me to myself, and it's brought me to all of you. He couldn't have left me a better gift.
Jean and Miz Minka, thank you. You are both part of the family!
Lin... I know the story. I too owe a debt to Tom, and I'll raise a toast to him the next time I can.
He played his part in changing my life too, I think.
It's all good.
Growth is good. Shedding old skins is good. Daring to hope and dream is good. Reaching out and telling the universe who you are is good.
You are good. Glad you're in my tribe!
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