on why I blog...

I started these blogs as a diary to chronicle my present days but always seemed to slide sideways into recounting the past days and past details of my own small life. The more I read and studied the accounts of others, both written and told, the more it seemed to me that we attempt such personal histories not to preserve knowledge, but to fix the past in a settled way.

Much like flowers pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say this is exactly how it was the first day I saw it. But like a flower, the past cannot be trapped this way. It loses its fragrance and vitality, its fragileness becomes brittleness and and its colours fade. And when next you look at the flower, you know that it is not all what you sought to capture.

It is that the moment has fled forever.

I captured my thoughts on paper and then electronically. I believed that by fixing it down in words I could force sense from all that happened, that effect would follow cause and the reason for each event would become clear for me. Perhaps I sought to justify to myself not just all I had done but who I had become.

For awhile now, I have written faithfully in these blog of mine. I have held it so carefully explaining my world and my life to myself. I leave these words alone now, trusting I have captured the meaning of my days.