finding time inside myself

Blog 365 was a catchy idea, a little something to give me the push to be on repeat, to open my eyes to the world and let me know what is worth recording, worth keeping.

And I must say this: oftentimes, I am not a quitter. I may have failed in projects, I may have a half finished quilt sitting in my cedar trunk, I may have partly learned to make a baby sweater or cable mittens for my husband. OK, so in truth, I am able to walk away easily.

From some things.

From others, no: my husband, for one. We'll hit nine years of togetherness this summer. I'm so excited. And if I were a quitter, we would have quit each other long ago, when things got dull, or hard, or frustrating, but we didn't. We see each other through. And we hold hands doing it.

And I'm not saying I'm going to outright quit Blog 365, since my tendency seems to perkily retreat into the blogosphere when I feel I have something to say, no matter how mundane it is, but I don't want to face a day where I think, "I must post something before I go to bed." Or groan at the idea of returning from a vacation because I need to play catch up.

My writing has sloughed off too. I know it. I am writing in a funk, I am writing to take up space and time, to exist. I am not doing well and I am hating myself for it. I'm bored with myself here.

But I think there comes a time when we must lay down the gimmicks, the bells and whistles and tacky ad-ons, and become more ourselves for ourselves. I suppose I could go off on a tangent about what the purpose of blogging is, why we turn to these pages, why we read about the lives of strangers, or keep up with our closest friends and think we actually know them better when they are become more like strangers in this disconnect.

I'm not trying to be offensive. Merely trying to convince myself that I need to stop betraying myself, my voice, and my original purpose for keeping a blog. (Wait a minute. I think I've forgotten. What was it again?)

I think what I am blindly puttering away at saying is this: My writing has gotten stale, and I need a scapegoat. I can have several, because this is the world of buffets and juggling fast food on our knees: I can blame the crunch of Blog365, or rather, my own dogged dedication to blogging each day, even when I had nothing useful to say (of course, without the apparatus, I'd still feel compelled), and I can blame this project of emptying my bookcase, of reading the books I'm willing to give away, which has certainly thrown my husband and a few others, the idea of my getting rid of books.

For those of you who write, do you feel you write better when you are surrounded by the voices of the writers you admire the most? I know many writers start in imitation, and it's not such a bad thing. We mimic and preen and hope we can get it right and in the process, we hope to find our own voices. I think reading good work, reading things that shimmer, that's what fuels our own purpose.

I think this is what I need to do: I need to exit that methodical endless loop and return to the voice of the spring. I need to find hope again, to come out of hibernation. It is all mud and muck outside, tracked in by our dogs, and I am ready to fling open the window. I am ready to let in new words, to learn new things.