I have kept a live journal for a few years and I continue to use it to stay in touch with people I know and to record my life. Lately I have wanted a venue for writing less personal and more polished/completed works. This seemed like a good time and this seemed like a good place. My hope is that this blog will inspire me to improve my writing in the way that flickr.com has encouraged me to refine my photography skills.
For today, I’ll start with the basic demographic details of the person behind these pages. In a couple of weeks, I’ll celebrate my 41st birthday. Between now and then I will reach another milestone in my life. That milestone will be the point my life has been longer than my mother’s life was; she died just before her 41st birthday. Her death when I was six was one of the biggest influences of the first three decades of my life. Over the years being a motherless daughter has played less and less of a role in my life but for approximately three decades that was a defining element of how I defined myself.
My nearly 41 years of life on the glorious planet have taken me from rural, northwest Oklahoma, to a brief stay at the home of the Sooners, to graduate school in Baton Rouge, to Mickey Mouse land in Florida, to the shadow of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, and finally, just over a year ago, to the southern shores of Lake Michigan and a place that feels like home. To say the least it has been quite a journey.
I currently live alone as a happily (most of the time at least) single gal with a lease that forbids pets and a life path that has not included children (I have mixed feelings about that one) though it did include a now ex-husband for a few years. Professionally, I spend my days teaching, doing research, and spending way too much time attending meetings at a small university campus.
For today, I leave you with the foundation of my developing personal mission statement. These words are borrowed from Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia (which I cannot recommend highly enough).
Welcome to the moments, magic, and mirabilia* of my journey to become a “wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss.”
__________
* mirabilia is defined on p. 175 of Pronoia as a noun that refers to “modest astonishments, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies.”
1 Comment
November 4, 2007 at 5:09 pm
[...] By the the end of August I was settling into my new home and expanding my mental map of my new territory. It seemed that each week brought wonderful new surprises. Some such as this field of sunflowers clearly qualify as “modest astonishments, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies.” (from the definition of mirabilia provided on page 175 of Pronoia; for more about this book and term see this post). [...]