blogging

on leaving some things unsaid

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I was going to carry on with part three (photo) and part four (name) of my one month review, and something has made me hesitate.  Is this too much reviewing?  I ask myself.  I feel a bit ‘I’ve started so I’ve finished’, but I don’t want to pay so much attention to something that I wear it out, like washing.

So in fact I will leave it there for reviewing for now.

Leaving some things unsaid is perhaps surprisingly like the dynamic of deciding when to jump off a wave you’re surfing.   Once you’re up, it’s so tempting to ride that wave all the way to the very end, to get the last centimetre of wave out of the experience.  But sometimes that leaves you on a scrappy bit of wave with no energy left in it, plus you’ve gone so far the paddle back can be really long.  Sometimes it’s better just to hop off earlier, leaving some energy and excitement ready for the next one.

In the writing I’ve been doing so far, knowing when to hop off what I’m writing has proven surprisingly challenging.  One of the most common final things before I post a post is to delete the last line.  (I’ll be heading over to ‘found poem, London, autumn 2014’ soon to get rid of ‘Go to it’, I can feel it’s too heavy-handed).  I have an aversion to overemphasising a point and making it annoying.  The other day I realised I wanted to coin a new word, something like obviaphobia, to label the fear I have of saying something that is too obvious, or that has been said too many times already, or getting wedged in an cliché.

(Leaving things unsaid is a habit I try to cultivate in friendships and work.  My sense of justice and precision is such that I often feel compelled to aim for accuracy in accounts of events, feelings, responsibility.  But this kind of precision can be too much to bear.  Discretion is an unsung hero of human relations.)

In music, I have been learning about ‘interrupted cadences’.  A cadence is two chords in a row.  The ones I have been learning about are at the end of a phrase of music.  A perfect cadence sounds like an ending.  And imperfect cadence sounds like you’ve just taken a breath but are about to end.  And then the interrupted cadence is my favourite.  It’s like leading someone up to the end of a path, and stopping just as the path turns a corner, and you can’t see what’s next.

The what’s next? is the unsaid bit, and I like the bit fact that leaving a bit unsaid leaves a space for the reader.

reflections on blogging, one month review, ‘discovering more beauty through writing’

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The subtitle to the blog ‘discovering more beauty through writing’ has also been on my mind.  I wrote it without any real reflection; this in itself is important for my work.  Writing is the place where I discover what I think and feel about certain things.  It seems to arrive onto my journal, a screen, a letter and it’s at that point that I find out what is there.  I know there are some people who mull over their work forming it in words in their mind before they write it down, but I’m not made like that.  Now I think of it, it’s like brewing tea (which I also love), I’m aware of phrases swimming about in my head for a certain period of time before they pour out in a writing stream.  I try to stay out of their way, because if too much conscious, analytical me gets in the way, they lose their naturalness.

There are several ways that I am discovering beauty through writing.  I love beauty – in nature, in things, in people, in adventures – and over time I have come to see beauty as a place in which magical things can happen, things like hope, healing, courage, revelation, insight.  In my own writing, I am trying to grow an attitude that sees more beauty in everything, but also to pay attention to particular instances of beauty, almost to amplify it in a world that is so often full of distress.  In addition to this, I have found that sometimes I can write about hard things and discover the beauty in them as I write.  This is because writing brings understanding and meaning, and it is meaning that can make difficult things bearable, and even redeem them and transform them into something full of honour and grace and depth.  For me, this is the true magic of writing.

Finally, knowing that I might want to write at any moment increases my attunement to the present.  It heightens my sensitivity to beauty all around me.  It makes me be on the alert for treasure that I can catch in my writing net and bring home to nourish people with.  It’s so much fun!

reflections on blogging, one month review, part one, ‘scrapbook of fragments’

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Well, I’ve managed a more conventional timescale for my blogging review this time.  A month.

Unlike seventeen days, a month is enough to become aware of patterns in yourself, not knowings, hopes, delights, perplexities.  Over the last week, especially, I have become aware of ongoing questioning of some aspects of what I am doing, both in the critical-inquiry sense and also the curiosity sense.

However, it also turns out that a month is also long enough to create deeper reviewing thoughts than I expected.  So I am going to post this review in parts…  Here’s part one.

In my ‘about’ page, I talk about this being a ‘scrapbook of fragments’, and this is indeed exactly what extraplorer has turned out to be.  I have felt settled enough with everything to post it (the one thing I felt unsettled about I took down), but I am aware that it is all higgledy-piggledy everything together as if I’d tipped a box of myself out onto the floor.  This is definitely liberating for me in terms of what to write, but it also does make me feel slightly uneasy, like I should tidy it up.  I peek at other blogs and think, ‘hmmm drop-down boxes with categories might be nice’.  But then I also like the idea that a reader could have an exploratory experience because everything is not neatly labeled and put in filing cabinets.

The other aspect of the ‘scrapbook of fragments’ is that it does not have an overarching story.  I would quite like to make one of these, like, ‘this is who I am and poem a means this and thoughts b means that’, but I’m aware that my desire to impose this kind of order will set me up to conform to what will at some point turn out to be a limiting narrative arc.

In my original idea, I thought that my ‘scrapbook’ might hint at some kind of underlying unity, and I think I do have a sense of this.  One thing I love is the ‘cloud’ of tags, and I like to see it and think of the nice things that there are to write about in the world.  Admittedly I do err on the positive side with my tag words, so it is true that ‘darkness’, ‘death’, ‘sadness’ don’t feature in the tags although they do have a place in my writing.  But still, that is part of what I want to achieve with my work – to point towards beauty and truth and love, both despite and because of the hard things.  Besides, sad things get plenty of attention without me adding to it.

This leads me nicely on to part two, ‘discovering more beauty through writing’.

ten things I love about blogging – seventeen day review

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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…