Honoring the Ordinary

I remember the first time I read about blogging in the New Yorker and wondered why anyone would want to write or read one. I even felt that way a few months ago, before friends talked me into trying it myself. By that time, I liked reading their blogs but the idea of writing one myself seemed so onerous...all that extra work to send words flying into space, with no one out there to catch them.

Every paper or magazine I pick up these days seems to carry some beef about blogs. They're mostly concerned with blogs that report or hold forth about the news. They would probably dimiss a blog like mine as tedious navel-gazing.

But I'm not navel gazing (after two children?perish the thought!). I'm observing the world around me little bits at a time and musing out loud about it, and this is what I like about the vast blog jungle. It's full of other ordinary observers and musers and people who don't want to let life slip by without charting it. When you stumble upon a blogger whose voice you like, that person will lead you to others and so on. I feel like a monkey swinging from one marvelous tree to another.

Or switching metaphors, as if I'm moving among galaxies. I flit from lit blogs to gardening blogs to farming blogs to cooking blogs to blogs about Afghanistan, each time leaving one cluster of voices for another. Constellations that wax and wane around a shared passion.

I was going to try for another metaphor about synapses in the brain, but three is too many for one post. Isn't that a great picture of the drive up Cedar Hill at 7:55 on a Sunday night, after spending the day on the shores of the great, raucus lake and eating too much cake?    ¶ 5:28 PM