The Stuff of Posts, The Stuff of Songs.
I keep three blogs now.
Three.
This means that I’m either always writing or always thinking about writing. My life becomes the stuff of posts, sometimes the stuff of songs. The medium, with its requirements of regularity and consistency, force me to see stories in my life and lay those stories down in text.
When I started this blog, it was my experiences with Druidry that were the meat of my writing. Discovering Druidry was the focus, and unpacking the questions provided countless opportunities to write. What does it mean? How is it relevant? Why? Why?
If I didn’t have anything to write, I probably wasn’t investing enough in my own spiritual work. That’s how I saw it. Writer’s block? Do ritual, read something, dig deeper.
But now with these three blogs — BITG, the Solitary Druid Fellowship blog, and the newest, #allofthesongs — my writing is broken into very different themes.
The SDF blog is an extension of service. I write there, or I organize the writing of others, in order to provide solitaries the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of solitude in their lives. A deeper engagement with solitude is a primary goal of the Fellowship, and this blog encourages that with each new post.
#allofthesongs is my foray back into music. It is the blog I created to give me a place to write about music — my music — and to process what it means to be a songwriter and performer. Many of the readers of this new blog come with the hopes of hearing about famous people, but the fans who’ve been following my career for the longest seem to appreciate the candidness with which I write about my creative process. Transparency is rare in the entertainment world.
But this blog, my First and Foremost, has alluded me lately. This was the place I created to ask questions about my spiritual path, and I’m not sure how to ask those questions right now. My journey into leadership with SDF and the Solitary SIG (a sub-group of ADF for solitaries) has made the asking of questions seem less timely or appropriate. Inquiry for inquiry’s sake might seem confusing to those who are looking to me for direction.
At least, that’s how it feels at times.
Inquiry is so important, though. Asking ourselves why we’re doing the things we’re doing opens up the possibility for new awareness. Our growth is dependent upon our occasional disassembling of our preconceptions and our assumptions. We have to keep asking questions or things get stale. The soil gets hard. Nothing can penetrate it.
Perhaps this is a natural thing to be thinking as we inch closer to the spring. There are eight High Days in my tradition, but sometimes I think it would be better if we recognized the seasons between them instead. These are the days we’re living. These are the days that require context. This season of Imbolc could be filled with inquiries into what it means to me making our way to a place of planting. This time could become a time of closer inspection of what is in our pantry (the one inside) to see what remains after the winter. We could use this time to reevaluate where we are, and to make plans about where we’d like to be when the sun returns.
I think I’d like to bring some synchronicity to these three blogs I keep. The post I wrote on #allofthesongs today is one that could have easily been on this blog, and this a post could have — with a little more focus on practice and solitude — been on SolitaryDruid.org. Maybe that’s the key to managing all of this creative work; to see how the various parts of myself are not actually so separate, and to allow them to become more integrated.
Perhaps this is a season of bringing things together.
