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missed you

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Dear extraplorer,

I’m home. You may not realised it but I have been away a long time.  I have to tell you that everything I have been doing while I have been away has been very important. I have been working all over the world, helping people to grow. I have been writing at home for weeks, finishing off a book I hope will make a difference to the world, and bring more courage and joy and delight (but will anyone ever read it, I’m not sure). And I’ve been keeping hope alive wondering what someone else is doing in a far away place. I have been cooking and eating and seeing friends and doing pilates and running and sleeping. Sometimes I have crept in here to see you and I have wished that I had something to write here. But all my thoughts have been in my book and all my energy has been on planes and trains and in classrooms, and I have wandered around in my heart but not been ready to share what is in there, not yet.

extraplorer, I miss you, but I am here now, and I will be back. Be patient.

x

early blog anxiety

~ extraplorer ~ 5 Comments

I am afraid of flatlining;
forty-eight dots on the WordPress
navigation bar
haunt my waking moments.

Ooooh the thrill of the tall
proud towers of views;
a forest of admiration;
peaks of blog achievement
I could almost stick my flag in.

I try to rationalise the valleys of
(invisibility)
which only occur (be reasonable)
when many other very
fulfilling and important
things are going on in the
real world.

The data analytics inner self
is not convinced.
We are losing momentum!
This is our chance!  Where is our poem
producer?  Nail her to her desk!

I try ignoring those dots…
It’s important for an artist to have
fallow period, I offer the comfort
of metaphors from the natural world.

All futile.  ‘If a tree falls in a wood
with no one to hear it’, or something?
Bottom line?  I don’t exist now.

When I signed up for this,
I had no idea that the dots were
taking over.

nearly three months review

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Suddenly more months have gone past and I haven’t had a moment to look back.  Christmas, New Year, woosh.

But it’s a sunny Sunday morning and I am nearing the three month anniversary of starting extraplorer.  I have a few minutes peace between business trips and the perfect moment to reflect and be happy about writing.

Of course when I started extraplorer, I had bits of writing lying around that I could add to extraplorer when I liked.  That gave me a thrill of momentum, but it was not sustainable forever.  I wish I had more time to write, but I am also happy to have a busy life of adventures in the outside world.  I wouldn’t swap the balance, I don’t think, even though it sometimes makes me feel restless.

Only one person in my ‘real life’ knows about extraplorer – my mother.  I am very very lucky that I have a mother who is trustworthy with these small attempts at writing.  Writing and having her comments is one thing that has given me more confidence that what I am doing is ‘real writing’.

And having real readers is the other thing.  I find it amazing to think of readers reading my writing (thank you so much fellow extraplorers!).

Sometimes I feel sad that I have not invited all my friends to join and see extraplorer yet.  In a way it feels awful, like having a baby and then asking a lot of strangers to come to visit it in the hospital while you tell your friends they are not welcome.  I am very lucky that some of my friends know about my blog, and are happy for me to trying things out in secret.  In a way, my friends’ generosity of spirit is the third thing that is making my writing be able to grow.

Thanks to these three sources of encouragement, I am becoming braver and getting closer to the day when I can share my work more confidently with more people.

ten things I love about blogging – seventeen day review

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

OK, so I know seventeen days isn’t a conventional review period, but I am brimming with reviewing thoughts about writing my extraplorer blog, and having missed the more traditional one week and fortnight review moments, I can’t wait any longer.

Here are my top ten:

1. Somewhere to share my writing ~ I have been writing a journal since I was sixteen, poems since I was six, and all sorts of other bits of writing, but I have not really had a space to share it.  I have read one or two things to close friends, but then some of my attempts to share things have met with a wall of silence, and this has made it feel hard to believe that what I am writing is ‘real writing’.  By setting up this blog as a series of fragments, I have been able to hop over the hurdle of ‘real writing’ and just write, which I love.

2. Writing ~ I can never understand authors and writers who say that they hate actual writing (or even sometimes that ‘everyone hates the writing part’).  I absolutely love it.  For me it is like falling in love, and hearing beautiful music, and watching children play and the dawn when the snow has just fallen.  I love love love it.

3. Readers ~ Of course this is ridiculous, but somehow when I decided to start the blog, I had forgotten that people might actually interact with it.  I had readers in my mind’s eye, but I had forgotten that readers would jump out of there and turn out to be real.  It is quite amazing that people are reading what I write (see point 1 above).  Thank you so much!

4. extraplorer ~ I also love the name extraplorer, and now I have had the idea for a secret blogging identity, I have had some follow ideas like making little cards with ‘extraplorer’ on them to help people who would like to read something like this to find it.

5. ‘Penscratcher theme’ ~ What a great word!  The minute I saw ‘penscratcher’, I knew it was the one for me.  I love the word and I love the layout.  I love customising.  It’s so fun being able to say ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that (and much much easier than designing a website which I’ve had to do for work and was laborious and very time-consuming).

6. Paying attention to things ~ This is one of my favourite things about writing – it helps to encourage you to pay deeper attention to things, and it also helps you to be brave.  There is a reason that a pen also connects with a sword and with a scalpel and with a torch.  It makes it possible to go deeper into things, to venture into dark places and take a look around, to understand more and even to do battle for things that are important (like beauty, and hope).

7. Learning about blogging ~ Now that extraplorer exists, I would like more people to be able to see it (again, if they would like to).  It’s fun to check our tips and work out what I might be able to do (and also helpful to be clear about what is not possible, given my other commitments).

8.  Becoming more creative ~ Having a space to write is making me stretch out creatively.  As I wrote before, creating found poems has been immensely joyful.  I’ve loved starting to think thoughts in writing and then follow the thought to the conclusion.  I love having a thought pop into my mind ‘passion opens doors’ and to have a place to explore it.

9. Secret identity ~ I feel a bit funny that I have not told all my own actual (lovely, fun, kind) friends about my blog, but the chance to try something in a totally fresh place is very invigorating.  For a while I worried about it in case I was not being brave enough, but no, I think sometimes a new land is an important place for growth and transformation.  It is a liminal space.

10.  Being connected to a new world ~ I’ve been a bit reticent about social media use because I feel sad when it’s used badly, and I feel protective about myself.  I use it for my work, but we could say I am a mixed-speed adopter.  Writing extraplorer has made me comfortable with taking time to find my place, my path and my pace, and taking the time to find out how to be wholehearted means I am really loving it.

So hooray for blogging, hip hip hooray!  And thank you WordPress for making something wonderful and fun.  And thank you people who are curious about extraplorer…