Threads of revelation

From time to time over the last few months, I’ve thought, “I’m done. My blog should be inactivated. I’ve dried up; there’s nothing more to say.”

And yet…

With the lack of regular writing has come a dullness. On the one hand, I am busy enough offline to justify giving up on blogging once and for all. When the ideas do come, I seem unable to find a moment to sit down and collect my thoughts. Such ideas as do occur to me are not in the habit of sticking around to roost. They fly away if they aren’t rounded up and captured in words. “Must not be very important,” I say to myself.

On the other hand, it’s writing that enables me to develop thoughts. Without the discipline of sentences and paragraphs, my little nuggets of observation are not sustained or integrated into meaningful insights. I miss that. Whether or not those insights are “important” to anyone else, they make my life more interesting to me. “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time,” Eudora Welty writes in One Writer’s Beginnings, “but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily –perhaps not possibly –chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.” In some way I don’t understand, blogging made that thread more visible to me.

I’d like to keep this page open and try to write more. But part of my problem is the box I’ve created here — more of a “book blog” than anything else. Truth is, I am mostly in a rereading season right now, and I’m not terribly interested in writing about what I read. My life and interests are more multifaceted now: homeschooling, nature, raising a puppy, searching for a church, parenting challenges, and — to be honest — some degree of mid-life crisis. Reading and the life of the imagination are relevant to all of these things, but not the main point.

We’ll see what “threads of revelation” become apparent in the coming days.