I started blogging 3 years ago today.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth

It was November 29, 2006. Tristan “presented” me with my very own namesake website and I was excited, but wary, hopeful, yet afraid; I felt exposed, naked and thoroughly vulnerable – about to share my innermost thoughts, stories and dreams with the whole wide world…or at least with my mom and my kids. 

“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”  Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen

Just emerging ever so slightly from a very despairing place at the start of the blog, my words initially felt ripped from my guts, laying me bare for everyone to judge.  Now I read those early posts and I doubt anyone can really see how bloody and tormented they were for the darkness I was struggling to escape.  But they were what I could do at the time.  Over the course of 3 years I have both willingly divulged and unmasked my pain and faults or carefully hidden and protected myself, alternately (it isn’t my real true life, only what I allow you to see).  But I am so much less afraid of feeling now and admitting to that, caution to the wind.

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer.  But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”   – Stephen King

I am so blogging this!

This is my 740th post and Akismet has saved me from over 50,000 vile spam comments.  I have rambled on about my family and music and movies and silly news stories and  my failures and blessings and what I have heard God say and the dog and gardening with a heavy tomato emphasis (because tomatoes are  probably the best thing I write at all) and growing and healing and I write graphomaniacally because it is how I finally, at this ridiculous age, am finding out what I actually think about things – about anything and everything.  Most anything is blog-fodder.

I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.  ~James Michener

My blog is my love note to living.  It’s the depository of the bits and pieces, “the collage”, as it were, of my thoughts and feelings and silliness and words.  It is embarrassingly me. 

The real reason I blog like a maniac?

I LOVE the comments.  I LIVE for the comments.  Like this one from Bryan recently when I mentioned how a lot of my blog-peeps had started spending so much time on Facebook, they aren’t really blogging anymore.  Here is his response:

“OK OK I’ve had a little bloggers-block of late and I actually don’t spend as much time on line as I usually do. I will try to do better. Because your side of the internet is getting full and I would hate for the internet to tip over.”

That did make me laugh, actually, right out loud! 

And guess what my mom wants for Christmas?  The only thing she requests?  She wants a book form in paper (!) of this blog – something she could get online at any given moment of the night or day. 

Ah, yes.  I am writing for my mama.  But I am glad/honored/so grateful you are reading, too.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.  ~Isaac Asimov

images: google (woman writing, and word collage), representing the “romantic” notion of writing a blog and the messy, wordy side of it