happy birthday just a position! : what's in a year?

I did it. I have consistently written in this blog and kept it active and growing for one full year. I am pleased and proud! Tonight I am composing my 46th entry, so in 12 months time that means I have averaged writing near to once a week. Hooray!

So why is this significant? Well, if you go back to my very first post you will read that one of my main reasons for starting a blog was so that I would have a tool that would compel me to be accountable to my writing and to write regularly. I am a writer, a poet, a wordsmith, a speller, an editor, a complete and total fool for the written word. Writing is my one true art, my love, my passion, my therapy and my pastime. Why then did I need compulsion to keep writing on a regular basis? Because, as many of you know, I am also a single, homeschooling, work at home mother, as well as an activist, a trance dancing priestess, a birth attendant in varying forms, a dog rescuer, a friend to many, a lover to a few, a cook, and a Burner, and that all takes up a whole, big lot of my time, and sometimes writing gets lost in it. But since I started my blog 1 year ago I have been writing more than I have in years. Hip, hip hooray!

So what else have my blog and I accomplished this year? We have seen deaths and births and sometimes both at the same time and have continued to work out our feelings about such matters. We have facilitated the beginning stages of my sons' adolescent years with sensitivity and just a hint of hilarity. We rescued and adopted a large, male rottweiler to add to our pack of two females, an elderly black lab and an also recently rescued, young husky shepherd. We also brought home an entire family of chickens, one mother hen and 10 chicks who grew up and then were systematically decimated by said husky shepherd leaving us, once again, chickenless. We have seen friends come live on our land, then leave no longer quite what I could call friends, to be replaced by other kind people with whom we share the land, and it seems there is a continual coming and going of the occupants of this place. We fulfilled the dream of many years of attending Burning Man, and decided that we ought to continue to go ad infinitum. We have had my lovers drift in and drift out, yet I am still occupying the romantic limbo that has been my place for many years now. We have been trying, essentially, to learn about and to live in love. We have enjoyed many, many moments with my young sons, and laughed heartily together. We have propagated poetry onto the planet. We have survived the season of the snake on this here mountain, and successfully hosted a breathtaking wedding ceremony practically in the rattlesnake snake den with no ill outcomes. We have trance danced and explored the ethers then come back to tell the tales. We have thought at times we would die from the exquisite pain of it all and others as though the deafening bliss would keep us aloft infinitely. We, apparently, have bonded, my blog and I, because I am now referring to my blog together with myself in the first person plural as if we were the best of buddies out doing all this wild marauding together. And thus, we must be.

So come one and come all and join my blog and me on the fabulous adventure of life through the next year. Let's continue to learn and grow and think and feel together, all of us. I have so thoroughly enjoyed the great dialogue that has arisen out my last posts and their comments; this is exactly the type of discourse I have always hoped for. Talk to me! Tell me what you think when I tell you what I think! Let's dialogue (I love using that word in a verb tense). I was telling a friend (you know who you are you sweet thing ;) tonight while celebrating the glory of my one year old blog that what I miss the most about the academic setting, and dear god I do miss it, is the excellent discourse amongst peers. It is one thing to read and write and formulate opinions and proffer them, but it is through the process of discussing them and sharing them and dissecting them then integrating others' input and ideas that allows us to grow and develop the most in our thinking and learning. I want to do that with all of you: those who have regularly followed my meanderings and those who occasionally drop in and those who are totally new to my zealous opining (ooh, that's another really sexy but atypical verb tense. See? I just love words!). Stick around, let's think together. Let's write together. Let's get our groovy letter rhumba on together!

For my blog's birthday my offer to you, dear readers, is a birthday gift. For every reader who leaves a comment on this birthday post, I promise to write a personal and individualized haiku in response to your comment. I assure that these haiku will be authentic and finely crafted pieces of poetic pleasure that you will treasure for years to come. I'd love to make poetry for all of you, and that is what I shall do. Thank you for your support and input, dear readers. I hope you'll stick around.

Tonight's composition was accompanied by a deeply steeped and well-cooled quart of red lavender tea.