blogs are amazing: a post for cassi

I have blogger's guilt, which is a silly self-imposed phenomenon, but nevertheless I am feeling it because I have sorely neglected this blog for the last year. Though the truth is, my blog is still serving me. As you may know, I started graduate school this summer. It has been an amazing whirlwind of an experience in which first I had this wild hair idea to go back to school against all adds, and next thing I knew I was doing it.

Now, I love it! So far, at least. I completed my summer semester with a 4.0, thoroughly enjoyed all my classes, learned a great deal and realized I am absolutely on the right path for myself at this time. One of the things I have realized through this process, first in applying to the program then in doing my coursework this past semester, is that my writing joints are well lubricated even though it has been seven years since I was last in school. Blogging did this for me! If you read my first post you will see that one of my intentions in starting this blog was to give myself a constructive outlet with some degree of accountability so that I would write and keep writing. At that juncture, I was specifically missing the structure of a formal educational environment that would force me to think critically and write proactively, so I made that for myself with this blog. Now that I am back in school, I don't need it as much, so I am writing here less. C'est la vie. But I love this blog and suspect I will always tune in from time to time to put in my two cents. I can't help myself. My brain churns out penny thoughts at an alarming rate. I've got to stash all that intellectual loose change somewhere.

The other thing that is amazing about blogs is how it connects people. Twice in the last year I have had lovely experiences in which someone who read my blog had been connected to me in the past or was going to be connected to me in the future. When I met the beautiful and talented Yoni Love online through myspace, she said to me, "I have been wondering when we would meet." She had been introduced to my blog through a midwife teacher we share, and she was already intimately acquainted with my writing when I wrote to her to ooh and ahh over her gorgeous yoni paintings (please check out her artwork, like the piece above, and contact her if interested in prints of her work). In fact, she had shared one of my poems with a birthing family to ease them in a difficult time. Wow.

Recently, I was contacted by a former acquaintance who had the mixed fortune I did to grow up in the same backwards, blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh from which I so gratefully escaped. That place always felt to me like a prison, a stifling, choking vortex of unhealthy attitudes and suffering people that I prayed through my youth to leave. And my suspicions were correct; my life blossomed in a liberating and healing way when I relocated. Every now and again I hear from folks still living in that same community, and all too often they are still stifled and stuck there carrying on the same attitudes and oppression that our families and neighbors bore before us. Once in a while, though, I meet up with a light that shone through, someone else who realized that, though they may stay in that place, they need not live that oppression and that they can seek emotional, spiritual and physical health through a different paradigm. Though I haven't spoken with her, Cassi, for whom I wrote this post, connected with me to say that she, too, has a passion for midwifery, and knowing midwifery as I do, I realize that if she holds dear the values of midwifery, she has come a long way since those dark Shaler days. I am glad you found me, Cassi. I am glad we can look behind us together and realize we are not stuck there. I would be glad to stay connected into the future.

So today, in honor of the gifts this blog has given me, I have decided to breathe a little new life into it. I've got a handful of small posts I have been meaning to add, and I will try to get them up in the next few days. School starts in one week, so before I get carried away by the rapid river of academic assignments, I'd like to dip my feet into this babbling brook of my creative writing a few more times. Thanks, "just a position." And thanks to all of you other writers out there connecting and sharing in our global community. Yay us!